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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Read it with North Carolina in mind.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It does us all no justice.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Defining the Cultural Underpinnings

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

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

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

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

On the liberal-leaning side:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Our College Towns’ Inevitable Role

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Powder Keg

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

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

White versus Black.

Rich versus Poor.

North versus South.

Gown versus Town.

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

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

Except it wasn’t.

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

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

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

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

What Have We Learned?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lessons to Carry Forward

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More reading:

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

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

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

THE CONSEQUENCES OF COLLAPSE

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

Read more

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

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

WHICH GOT ME THINKING

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

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

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

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

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

1. Marry New Urbanism and YIMBYism

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

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

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

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

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

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

2. Fix the Schools

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

3. Relocalise the Practice

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

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

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

A Small Team, A Wide Mandate

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Spoiler alert: it did not go smoothly.

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

A TIMELINE OF GALLOWS HUMOR

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

He did not return.

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

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

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

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

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

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

WE WON’T GET FOOLED AGAIN

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

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

That’s the cost of permitting and inspections sandbagging.

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

CH CH CH CH CHANGES

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

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

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

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

KEEPING THE FAITH

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

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

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

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

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

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

When Land Use Words Mean Their Opposite

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

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

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

• Those who design affordable housing are presented as threats to affordability.

Each inversion deserves its own essay, but the pattern is clear. Inverting language allows factions to signal virtue by demagoguing others to secure power.

In most cities, the cause is structural. Professional planners and academics—trained to perfect systems rather than build things—create complexity that privileges policy insiders and penalizes enterprise. Complex codes, coupled with opaque and approval systems, allow demagogues to rise by “defending the people” against those who are simply trying to navigate the broken system.

…what Inversionists say does not match what they do.

With this scapegoating, the inversions migrate to policy. Codes ostensibly meant to protect equity lock-in exclusion. Anti-corporate rhetoric handcuffs everyone except the corporations large enough to navigate the maze. The inversionists claim to fight for the poor, while ensuring the poor have nowhere new to live.

In short, what Inversionists say does not match what they do. This is moral inversion, and much of it is intentional.

Why Moral Inversion Persists

Moral inversion offers the inversionist two main benefits: simplicity and sanctimony. With simplicity, black and white thinking requires little effort to practice, and in a world of short attention spans, it is an effective way to attract cult followers. Offering salvation without work will always have appeal. It’s a lazy way to become popular.

With this dichotomy between good and bad, inversion inevitably starts with populism but leads to despotism. The common denominator throughout populism and despotism is holier-than-thou sanctimony, the notion that one group is morally superior to another. This, too, appeals to the masses, who want to blame someone else for their plight.

Combined, simplicity and sanctimony enable the inversionist to claim the moral high ground and claim power, all without actually doing work or taking responsibility for their own behaviors.

In every progressive city, the anti-development faction is small but loud. They are highly credentialed, deeply certain, and rarely self-reflective. They are entirely reliant on the world seeing them as all good and their opposition as fundamentally bad. This is why they spend inordinate hours establishing the non-truth that all builders and developers are terrible people, motivated only by profit, etc.

When these assertions are challenged anecdotally, inversionists react in anti-social ways. They act out because their ability to benefit from this system collapses as soon as they are recognized as anything other than unimpeachably good (or, conversely, when their scapegoats are recognized as anything other than unimpeachably bad).

Thus, once such virtuous language is co-opted by bad actors, it becomes a tool of control, and reform itself looks suspicious. Anyone proposing change, especially pragmatic change, is cast as the villain. Why? Because reform threatens the idea of the inversionists as the exclusive custodians of virtue.

You can see this pattern play out in how every city—from Portland to Durham—turns reformers into villains, for the devilish act of wanting to build homes during a housing crisis. In progressive circles, inversion is most prevalent in areas with high elite overproduction, such as the West Coast, New England, and college towns.

I will write more about why people buy into the framework in a future post.

But there is hope

Yes, inversion is maddening. And for those not paying close attention, it is tough to spot. But truth still finds its level. Always.

Every empire of self-righteousness eventually collapses under the weight of its contradictions. Eventually, words regain meaning when actions reveal truth. Those who weaponize language to hide their failures eventually run out of words.

And that’s when cities start working again.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The conversation went like this:

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

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

Ressentiment

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sound familiar?

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

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

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

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

The philosopher Confucius might have said it best:

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

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

That’s how communities are built.

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In 2023, he outlined the top “Ten code reform priorities for the housing crisis,” a list that covers the lowest-hanging fruit in housing policy reform. These priorities provide a simple, actionable framework for policymakers and urban planners looking to assess how effectively their cities are responding to failures in their housing markets.

Below, I’ll summarize Anderson's top ten priorities and then apply these principles to Durham, one of the national leaders in zoning reform, to see how the city stacks up.

Grading Durham’s Zoning Reform Efforts

To gauge Durham’s progress, I’ve applied these ten priorities to our zoning reforms using a simple binary grading system—each policy either meets the mark (1 point) or doesn’t (0 points).

Let’s break down the score:

1. Eliminate minimum off-street parking (✅): Durham has made progress here. You no longer have to provide off-street parking, but if you do, then you become vulnerable to other problematic requirements, e.g., no parking allowed in front of your home. Forcing parking into spaces that do not make sense (because of trees, topography accessory structures, etc.) degrades projects. On flag lots, in particular, it limits the number of houses you can fit. I have also seen the parking requirements force people to remove beautiful trees. (Still, the spirit of parking reform is here, so I’m giving it a point.)

   

2. Allow ADUs as-of-right (✅): Durham is probably the best city in the country for ADUs. We have not only legalized backyard housing; we have recently expanded citizens’ options for how to build them. They can be as large as 1200sf. Notably, Durham is one of the few cities in the country to allow duplex ADUs and faith institutions can now build an unlimited number.

   

3. Adjust building codes for small units (✅): In 2023, the State of North Carolina enacted reforms to allow up to four units under the International 1-2 Family Residential Code (IRC). With this simpler and more affordable code, the reform should have a massive impact on small-scale development.

4. Remove redundant zoning rules (❌): Durham’s revolutionary small lot code now allows for 1200sf maximum homes on 2000sf maximum lots, a reform that effectively rebooted the starter home market. While lot minimums were reduced, they still exist, which severely hampers housing choice. Because they discriminate against re-subdivision for more fee-simple starter homes, I am not granting a point.

5. Exempt ADUs from density limits (✅): Since 2006, Durham has exempted ADUs from density limits.

6. Reasonable Limits on ADU size (✅): ADUs in Durham can now be built up to 1200sf, so long as they do not exceed the size of the primary dwelling. This is one of the more flexible ADU codes in the country.

7. Remove covered parking requirements (✅): The city has no requirement for covered parking. Off-street parking requirements were eliminated in 2023.

1. Allow flag lots (✅): Durham has long had flag lots but recently legalized small flag lots, a crucial reform for maximizing underutilized land and increasing housing stock.

2. Base fees on square footage, not units (❌): Durham’s fee structure is driven by the number of units, not the total square footage of the building. This can be tricky to explain, so here is a good example. Take a 4000 sf mansion home. Durham now charges progressive permitting fees based on the size of the home, so a 4000 sf home will create more fees than a 1000 sf home. However, if the property owner wants to make the 4000 sf mansion home 4 (or 8) mansion flat apartments, they will still be penalized because the fees per unit remain larger than the fees per square foot. If the goal is affordability and access, the fees should be charged exclusively by square foot, removing the penalty for providing more (smaller) homes. Durham does not do this, so no point is awarded.

3. Revise exclusionary zoning (✅): In the simplest of terms, “exclusionary zoning” is the ubiquitous presence of single-family-only zoning. Durham eliminated this type of zoning in its urban core in 2019, becoming one of the first cities in the South to do so.

TOTAL SCORE: I give Durham an 8 out of 10.

What Durham’s Score Means

An 8 out of 10 is a solid start, though it translates into a B- grade. While Durham has made major strides in key areas like parking reform, ADUs, and small-unit construction, some of the more nuanced issues—such as minimum lot sizes and fee structures based on square footage—still need work. Given the breadth of the issue, it’s clear that even a city like Durham, a national leader in zoning reform, still has work ahead.

And that's the reality across the country. Zoning reform is complex, and even the most forward-thinking cities have only begun to scratch the surface. A B- grade is far from perfect, but it’s also a reminder of just how challenging the housing crisis truly is. As we continue to push for reforms, let’s be clear-eyed about where we stand—and how much further we need to go.

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“Do you want to create and build wealth in this country? You've got to help people become landlords.”

Eric Kronberg doesn’t say that as a provocation — he says it as a strategy.

The Atlanta-based architect (and friend of mine) has been quietly flipping the script on housing equity, shifting the conversation away from abstract “affordable housing” and toward ownership, subdivision, and a gentle but radical idea: give people the right to develop their own land.

That starts with code, but it doesn’t end there. In legacy Black neighborhoods like English Avenue, Kronberg sees an opportunity — not just for new housing but for wealth-building. Essentially, the people who got locked out of ownership need to be locked back in.

You build wealth in the smallest increments of being a landlord. We used to talk about being a duplex. Taking even a step further down to a home with the JADU (Junior Accessory Dwelling) or a guest suite, or renting out of bedroom, where having some separation of tenant or occupancy helps make it more [private and] flexible.

And that means unlocking small-scale landlordism. Build a guest suite and rent it out. Carve off a flag lot and sell it to your cousin. Create a new real estate ladder, one that people can actually climb.

THE PROBLEM

But there's a catch. Zoning might let you subdivide — but capital won’t always follow. Banks don’t love weird little units on unconventional lots. Appraisers don’t know what to do with creative housing, especially the types that do not fit into their pre-defined box.

And cities still haven’t figured out how to process things that live between categories. So while form-based code reform is great, it won’t fix equity alone. “We’ve had folks where everything lines up on paper — and they still can’t build because the financing won’t underwrite,” Kronberg says.

…AND SOLUTION

This is where Kronberg’s work gets quietly revolutionary: he’s not just building projects — he’s building regulatory and financial workarounds. He’s in the meetings. He’s talking to civic groups in plain English. He’s drawing the alleys.

And yes — alleys. According to Kronberg, the most overlooked piece of city infrastructure might be its biggest infill opportunity.

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“I suspect that the 2030s will be the best decade for American urbanism in a century.”

That’s something I said in a conversation with Geoff Graham on his podcast Yeoman. And I meant it. But it’s not a prediction—it’s a conditional. The next decade could be the new renaissance, our architectural roaring twenties, and our last best chance to build beautiful, affordable cities. But it will only happen if we break the machine that’s been holding us back.

That machine is zoning. Specifically, Euclidean zoning, born from the 1926 Supreme Court case Euclid v. Ambler. That case handed American cities near-total authority to dictate what could—and, more importantly, what couldn’t—be built. On paper, it was about keeping factories away from homes. In practice, it became the blueprint for banning apartments, corner stores, duplexes, and anything that didn’t fit a narrow, tightly controlled vision of static, segregated suburbia.

By granting so much power to government bureaus, Euclid diluted (destroyed?) localism. It stripped citizens of their agency in shaping their own communities. As Geoff said during our conversation, “The most local entity is the individual... it was the highest level overreach that took that individual’s rights away.”

Before Euclid, cities grew the way human places do: one small lot at a time. Typically, one small builder at a time.

Builders and homeowners worked from pattern books, local customs, and need. It wasn’t perfect, but it was organic, and it was alive. After Euclid, change became something that required permission. Creativity became deviance. Risk was criminalized. And over the next century, as Derek Thompson’s book Abundance points out, we buried a thousand great cities under the weight of process.

If we want to build again, we have to undo the legal overreach that made normal citybuilding illegal. We should be exploring radical ways to accomplish this. In the podcast, I suggest the simplest path, a holy grail of reform: Overturning Euclid.

Any constitutional challenge would recognize what the decision got wrong in the first place. Euclid overlooked that America’s historical urban cities were inherently dynamic and growth-oriented. Euclid was anti-change. It presumed that suburbia would be a progressive, modernist utopia, which might have sounded great, but was in all practicality antithetical to every tradition that had preceded it.

WHAT’S THE FIX?

Not every city has to grow. Not every place needs to change. But the ones that want to should be allowed to. And cities, particularly America’s legacy cities, want to grow. That’s their DNA.

Thus, for cities chartered before 1926—before zoning was standardized—zoning would (and should) be invalidated as a taking. Let those cities breathe again. Let them return to their elastic, iterative roots. Let people build, as StrongTowns advocates, the next increment up.

THE YOUTH ARE KNOCKING

Overturning Euclid is not just a legal strategy. It’s a cultural reset.

In 2025, we’re not short on people who want to build. We’re short on places where they’re allowed to. It’s particularly true of younger—now ascendant—generations. I added on the podcast, “Gen Z and millennials like interesting things. They want to feel connected through creativity and dynamism. They're ready to go.”

They’re not looking to recreate Levittown. They want cities with character, places with texture, neighborhoods that allow for spontaneity and social life. But instead, they’ve inherited a system where every change requires a traffic study and a prayer. We’ve locked them out of the sandbox and told them it’s for their own good.

The irony is that despite their burgeoning demand, we’re getting bad development anyway. With Euclidean planning, sprawl marches on. Parking lots and beige boxes multiply. The only thing it’s really succeeding at is killing initiative. Too often, that’s the point.

If we want cities that are creative, we have to stop criminalizing creativity. If we want neighborhoods that evolve, we have to let them change. And if we want the next generation to build something worth inheriting, we need to stop making them beg to participate.

We already know what’s possible. Seaside, New Town Saint Charles, Wheeler District—these places didn’t emerge from a checklist. They emerged from vision, leadership, and a willingness to start building. The tragedy is that almost no one would be allowed to start those projects today. Not without 10 years of legal fees and a stack of concessions for people who didn’t want these visions built in the first place.

So yes, I believe the 2030s will be the best decade for American urbanism in a century.
But it won’t be because we passed a better design code or added more layers to the process. It’ll be because we finally tore out the root obstruction—Euclid—and got out of our own way.

And when we do? We might just earn ourselves a New Renaissance.

🎙️ Listen to the full conversation with Geoff Graham on Yeoman here
📬 Subscribe to Southern Urbanism for more like this
🐦 Follow me @aaron_lubeck

This article initially led with an AI-inspired version of a Dover Kohl rendering drawn by James Dougherty. A discussion on the use of AI for such purposes was curated by Victor Dover online.

Below I am forwarding an excellent essay by , who publishes the substack , which covers “aspects of urbanism and higher ed that do not often cross in other spaces.”

In this piece, he unpacks all that is wrong with the modern world by using the American school car pickup line as a case study. I wrote a similar article—about how planners’ guidance on minimum school site size is suburbanizing cities and guaranteeing unwalkable developments—which was published last year.

Ryan makes a few novel points:

1. International students are aghast at the way America provides school transportation, how detached our schools are from housing, how absurdly large our school sites are, and how virtually every family must use a combustion engine to get to and from the facilities every day.

2. The pick-up line is now so ingrained in our culture that mommy blogs have popped up to swap book suggestions while they wait.

3. In most of the world, well more than 95% of kids walk to school, but in America, it is around 10%, down 75% since the 1960s.

4. Public entities seek to save money through consolidation, which has caused a spiral of negative externalities. Everything has grown larger: sprawling cities, the size of schools, the size of residential lots, and the land area per person. As a result, 2.5 times as many kids travel over three miles to school as did in 1969.

5. These larger, exurban schools now appear to be white elephants, requiring more extensive administrations and complex logistics.

6. Walkable schools require no school buses, while America’s schools require hundreds of seldom-used $500,000 vehicles, thousands of part-time school bus drivers, and maintenance staff to support them. For the rest of the world, this is unnecessary.

It is an excellent essay by . I hope you enjoy it. Be sure to subscribe to his substack, as well as mine!

College Towns

The School Car Pickup Line Is a National Embarrassment

I teach a lot of international students about the US education system and our schools. Whenever they go into our schools for the first time, one of the things that always shocks them is the school car pickup traffic lines. These lines are ugly, annoying, dirty, and they have become a common mainstay in American schooling…

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a year ago · 351 likes · 114 comments · Ryan M Allen

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Imagine if the government forced every new apartment to include a free horse stall. Or boat stall. Or made restaurants build extra root cellars that no one actually wanted or needed. Sounds absurd, right? But that’s exactly what cities have been doing for decades with mandatory parking requirements.

But there is good news on the horizon. After parking requirements dictating American land development forms for more than half a century, there are now rumblings in state legislatures across the country that this is all coming to an end—and it’s primarily due to the leadership of a wonky UCLA planning professor, who passed away last month.

SHOUP (THERE IT IS)

Donald Shoup, the world’s leading parking reformer, spent 40 years exposing this basic scam: cities require developers to overbuild parking, subsidizing car ownership at the expense of everything else—housing, walkability, small businesses, the environment. The town claims victory by seeming to get something for nothing just by demanding compliance with these extremely technical and specific codified standards.

But Shoup proved that there’s no science behind it. Zero.

Shoup proved the numbers were made up—pseudoscience cloaked in credentialism and code.

The absurdity of these standards has only grown with time. Do planners really carry with them sage knowledge that each bar needs three parking spaces per pool table? Or 3.3 parking spaces per 1000 sf of retail sex shop? (These are actual codes written by actual professionals in North Carolina.)

North Carolina now has a chance to break free. HB369 would eliminate parking mandates statewide—potentially making NC the national leader in parking reform and legislative sanity. It’s a huge deal, and I explain why below.

The High Cost of “Free” Parking

Shoup, who passed away on February 6th, laid it out bluntly: mandatory parking requirements make everything worse.

When planners codify parking requirements, “they do not know how parking requirements increase the price of everything except parking; how parking requirements affect architecture and urban design; how parking requirements affect travel choices and traffic congestion; how parking requirements affect air pollution, fuel consumption, and CO2 emissions.”

But we do know that the negative externalities of parking requirements mean that:

1. Housing Costs More – Every “free” parking space isn’t free at all—it just gets baked into higher rents and home prices. You might not even own a car, but guess what? You’re still paying for a parking space.

2. Businesses Suffer – Want to open a café in an old storefront? Too bad. The zoning code demands 20 parking spaces you can’t possibly fit. Parking minimums kill local businesses before they even get started.

3. Cities Sprawl Out – All those extra parking lots? They push buildings farther apart, making it impossible to walk anywhere. The result: more traffic, longer commutes, and cities that feel like giant strip malls.

4. Environmental Costs are Inevitable – Subsidizing car storage means subsidizing car use. And more driving = more emissions. (HB369’s major sponsor is Cawawba Riverkeeper, an environmentalist group aware of parking requirements’ devastating effect on runoff.)

Shoup compares parking mandates to dark energy—a hidden force that “spreads cities out and rips them apart.” But the truth is, the bigger problem is procedural; parking mandates are just bad policies dressed up as common sense.

Too few in the planning profession are taking responsibility.

While cities like Raleigh and Durham have led by removing minimum parking requirements entirely, they remain on the books in nearly all municipalities. Planning consultants continue to pedal them into new codes every day.

Something must be done. An outside force appears to be needed.

HB369: The Statewide Fix

Here’s where North Carolina has a chance to get it right. HB369, The Parking Lot Reform and Modernization Act, was filed on March 11th, 2025, and would eliminate parking mandates statewide.

HB369 would prohibit “a zoning or other development regulation” from “requr[ing] a minimum number of parking spaces per development or structure, regardless of occupancy or use.”

It’s that simple. What does it mean for citizens, retailers, politicians, and small practitioners?

It would let people—not zoning codes—decide how much parking they need. And it would end the practice of the one-size-fits-all nonsense that wastes inordinate amounts of planner and applicant time.

IT’S STILL A CHOICE

Critically, HB369 is not a ban on parking. It’s a ban on forced parking. The distinction is critical (and many will miss it, and many more will deliberately mislead people about it). If developers think their projects need space, they can still build them. But they won’t be forced to pave over half a city block just because a Model Cities zoning code from 1969 says so.

And the benefits? Massive. Cheaper housing results from lower construction costs. More walkable, vibrant cities result from less dead space, with more actual places worth going. Better small business growth occurs because your local coffee shop shouldn’t have to provide a stadium’s worth of parking.

Will HB369 Pass?

The time has come for America to take its kill shot at parking requirements. And legislatures are raising their crosshairs.

Politically speaking, HB369 is a bipartisan bill and has something for everyone. Shoup notes:

Conservatives will see that it reduces government regulations. Liberals will see that it increases public spending. Environmentalists will see that it reduces energy consumption, air pollution, and carbon emissions. Urban designers will see that it enables people to live at higher density without being overrun by cars…Elected officials will see that it depoliticizes parking, reduces traffic congestion, allows infill development. Finally, planners can devote less time to parking and more time to improving cities.

If this sounds radical, it’s not. Other cities and states have already done it—and the sky didn’t fall. In fact, things got better.

The only real opposition comes from the usual opposers of citizen choice reforms—anti-development factions who oppose all change, particularly if it might result in more housing; planner associations who resent the territorial encroachment; Municipal Leagues who loathe all power shifts from cities to states; and of course, people who think free parking is a birthright.

But the truth is, parking isn’t free—everyone pays for it whether they drive or not. HB369 is about ending this parking Ponzi scheme.

How NC Legislature Will Break the Status Quo Bias

Shoup once said that parking reform is like opening a combination lock: each little change might achieve nothing, but when everything lines up, the city finally unlocks its potential.

With this bill, North Carolina is on the verge of something big. HB369 isn’t just about parking—it’s about freeing cities from outdated, car-first, car-only planning.

There is certain to be a parade of states seeking to break up with mandatory parking—and more in the years to come. To honor the work of the late Dr. Shoup, North Carolina should grab the baton and lead the way.

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Last Thursday sucked.

“Hey, the water pressure is extremely low.” That’s the text I got from the 7-month pregnant couple staying in my apartment garage.

It was 7 am, and I had a backlog of work and two important client meetings I had drawings to prepare for.

And no running water.

That’s when the franticness started. At this point, I presumed that this was not going to be a good day.

As a general contractor, I know what to look for. With no water in the crawl space and no apparent leaks around the foundation, I found the water meter in front of the house flooded out.

The bad news was that I had identified the leak. The good news was that this was most likely a city issue.

I was lucky to get through to city staff around 7:30 am, which was the first positive turn for the better. I had just assumed this would be 8 am minimum, if not 9, and then it would take a day or two to get through to a responsible party to start the repair process. Who knows how long it would take to schedule and mobilize site crews?

I had already mentally prepared for a long haul. In my land use advocacy and permitting world, there is no other type of haul.

On this 7:30 am call, professional support personnel from the City of Durham clarified that leaks on the city side of the meter were considered urgent and subject to their emergency response team. He said someone would likely be out within the hour.

Working with the city on a roughly weekly basis, this response seemed almost laughable. It takes 12-18 months to do a rezoning. It takes 6 months to get a sewer tap installed. “You'll be out before 9 am?” I thought. “like, today?” “With a heavy excavator and dump trucks?” Surely, this would not be the case.

Except it was.

A crew of five worked diligently to clear space for the repair (particularly difficult on an urban street with curb parking packed on school days). Yet, by 11 am, the utility trench was excavated. And by noon, service was restored.

The crew was professional, skilled, and expedient.

WHY CAN'T ALL GOVERNMENT WORK EXPEDIENTLY?

There’s definitely an engagement trap in progressive cities, which can be proven, via negativa, with my public works experience. What if, instead of fixing a major infrastructure problem in 3 hours, public works decided to treat my water line failure as a USDOT grant issue, requiring city-matching funding? And with the matching funding, it would need to be voted on. And if it needed to be voted on, then it needed to be subjected to public engagement. And if you start engagement, you need to engage with everyone, and here’s the list, etc.

In blue cities, we regularly make simple problems difficult. And we do not have to.

But I get it; some public priorities are more urgent, and some things genuinely take months, if not years, to design and build. But most things don’t. I offer an example.

I’ve been an active advocate for bicycle boulevards since 2011, when my children were 3 and 5 and could not bike safely around the city. Since then, I have, on dozens of occasions, suggested that a huge part of the problem could be fixed by simply adding flower planters to these corridors. They’re cheap, they’re flexible, they slow cars, and they demarcate bicycle priority. They should take a few hours to install.

With other advocates, we’ve provided budgets, drawn schematics, gathered quotes for support, and provided installation maps. Each time, the request goes into a black hole of politics, mismatched funding sources, engineering, planning, and engagement.

It’s just flower planters.

I’ve watched $10,000 in utility work get done in 180 minutes. But, in this example, I suspect I’ve witnessed 10 years and $500,000 of engineering and engagement debate on whether or not (and where) we should install a $200 planter. Just install them.

It’s just flower planters.

Why can’t simple things be done simply?

There’s a more significant lesson here on why the way we do public engagement is broken and ultimately unhelpful. In the case of the flower planters, engagement should succeed—not precede—simple installation. We could have had flower planters on the ground in 2015, which would have been lovely and placemaking and pride-inducing. The ones that didn’t work, for some reason (if there were any), would be subject to feedback and moved. That’s how cities should work.

FEEDBACK PLATFORMS BREED NEGATIVITY

A stand-up comedian once did a bit where he noted the ridiculousness of those 1-800 How’s My Driving bumper stickers that were ubiquitous on tractor-trailers in the 1990s. He said something to the effect of, “I’d call the number and be like, ‘Hey, did you have an 18-wheeler in Tucumcari on Wednesday? I just wanted to say that this guy did a 3-point turn that was beautiful. Absolutely magnificent stuff.”

The point is that no one uses feedback platforms for positive feedback. In this sense, public feedback systems are fatally flawed because they are inherently negative and non-representative. They should be labeled for what they are: complaint platforms.

Cities are easy to critique because they are massive, complex organisms with billion-dollar budgets, temporary leadership, and politicization of even the tiniest of issues. There’s no shortage of things that are not working in a city. I am not innocent of the critiques; I spend a lot of time deconstructing public planning and zoning. But the Public Works experience reminded me of two things:

1. City work is primarily a thankless job, and

2. These massive organisms do, sometimes, get things right

So I offer thanks where thanks is due. The Public Works crew leader was Kevin Horton. He ran a ship-shape job while representing the city. And I appreciate that.

The biggest issue with housing discourse is that cities' words don't match their actions, particularly when it comes to comprehensive plans and zoning.

This disconnect—cities saying one thing and doing the opposite—is all too common in development discussions. It consistently obstructs the creation of the walkable, vibrant future many of us want.

Geoff Graham, a developer involved with I’On, recently tweeted how political pressures forced them to build something different than what they originally planned. As he explains, this outcome harmed the development, the town, and the lower-wealth people they sought to serve.

His full account is below, following my thoughts on why comprehensive plans and the politicization of housing (zoning) are fatally problematic. These documents not only fail to serve their intended purpose, but often do the exact opposite.

THE BROKENNESS OF COMP PLANS (and ZONING)

The utility of comprehensive plans (comp plans) is questionable. These plans are supposed to represent the community’s vision, but in reality, they are little more than formless value statements shaped by current political trends. To put this in context, election cycles rarely exceed 24 months. I’On took about 30 years to build.

For Geoff Graham, the political climate didn’t align with the comp plan, forcing the removal of the more affordable multifamily housing as a prerequisite to securing approval for the project.

Lower-cost housing is often blocked by politics, but it is usually developers who get blamed. Policy creates a housing shortage, and then politicians shift the blame onto developers. It’s a classic deflection of responsibility, now ubiquitous in American housing politics.

In my view, American cities would be better off without comp plans. They’ve become just another procedural barrier to progress. Comp plans are particularly obstructionary to anyone seeking non-uniform developments, which walkable mixed-use communities (like I’On) inherently are.

Every city suffers from this problem, which presents as politicians acting in ways that are in direct defiance of their comp plans. That’s exactly what happened at I’on.

HOW POLITICS MADE I’ON WORSE

Located in Mt. Pleasant, South Carolina, just north of Charleston, I’On is a well-designed, new urban development with top-notch land planning, architecture, and mixed uses. However, it lacks lower-cost housing, a critical societal issue.

Why isn't there any lower-cost housing?

The town’s comprehensive plan at the time of entitlement supported a vision of walkability, mixed-use spaces, and diverse housing types. But politically influenced zoning laws required a campaign to turn this vision into reality.

The rezoning process was costly and contentious. The developer had to make significant compromises, including eliminating multifamily housing and most commercial space.

The result, though an improvement over previous zoning, still led to Mt. Pleasant continuing its habit of underwriting sprawling, car-dependent growth. At the edge of the city, large-scale retail replaced local businesses. The disconnect between housing, commercial spaces, and infrastructure continued the harmful effects of zoning.

My conclusion? The politicization of zoning prevents better housing. Bad zoning politicizes everything. Therefore, zoning is the problem.

Read on for Geoff’s first-person account, as he explains it better than I can.

Some thoughts on the democratization of land use (aka zoning),

how it impacts communities, how it promotes distant and financialized interests, and why it is evil

by Geoff Graham

When we sought our rezoning for I'On, the town's staff was an important advocate. They had just completed a large comprehensive plan calling for exactly what we wanted to build (walkability, mixed-use, diversity of housing types, infill, etc), and had effectively been recruiting developers who shared that vision. Unfortunately, the town's zoning did not reflect their plan and so anything a developer wanted to do that aligned with vision still required a political campaign.

Fortunately for us, a number of influential local groups supported the vision laid out in their comprehensive plan, and when we began seeking our rezoning, they allied with us to help us secure the permissions we needed to build something special. The Coastal Conservation League was among them and their assistance was crucial. What we did for three years would appropriately be called "beating the drum." I would guess that at the time there had never been more community outreach for any endeavor in the town's history.

It was expensive and, unfortunately, divisive. Zoning is divisive by its very nature, so the acrimony was unavoidable. It imposed costs that were direct and indirect, obvious and hidden. Those costs were ultimately shared both by us (the developer) and the community.

In the end, we had more people speak against our project than any other proposed development in the history of the town (twice, because we were shot down in our first rezoning attempt). We also were the first to have more people speak in favor of a development than against.

Nevertheless, to satisfy the political requirements imposed by zoning (which elevate the interests of the most outspoken opponents over of the interests of the property owner or the long term best interests of the community), we had to eliminate all multifamily and the majority of our commercial to secure the entitlements we needed to build on our undeveloped 244-acre infill property in the heart of one of the fastest growing towns in the southeast.

In the end, the town council decided to push new multifamily to the outskirts of town where they had no infrastructure and the tomatoes and strawberries would not object. Additionally, rather than having lots of smaller-scale (and locally-owned) commercial nearby, they preferred to have large-scale big box retailers out on the edges of town. I recall some of these people actually invoking the donut to describe their land use vision.

Predictably, the net effect of the donut strategy has been that all these people now make lengthy car trips through town on ever-widening arterials. They mayn't walk or bike around, nor may they make considerably shorter trips by car (or golf cart) via a network of streets that diffuses traffic. The housing in which they live is built and owned by the nation's largest builders and REITs, the number of small local retailers is negligible, and most of life's necessities are purchased from giant financialized corporations that reside in ugly boxes accessible only via cars and highways.

Moreover, employers must pay those without the means to afford luxury to drive great distances to work in the stores, in the schools, on the jobsites, etc—which of course, makes everything more expensive. That cost has climbed so much that building and maintaining robots to prepare a meal or make a coffee is becoming more cost-effective than paying someone to do the same thing after driving an hour to and from the workplace.

This is what the democratization of land use (aka zoning) hath wrought.

To be clear, I am a huge fan of input from the community. Developers (like creators of any good or service) want to create things that people want. However, empowering people to have control over things they don't own is evil and has terrible results—our built environment being among the more obvious.

Of course, developers should shoulder the external costs associated their project and never should the cost of their critical infrastructure be socialized (as is the case in exurban development), but in general, the right way for things to be is for interested community members to seek to persuade the developer, rather than the other way around.

Nowadays, people think I'On is amazing, and it is obviously way better than what the prior zoning allowed, but it is far from what it could have been without zoning and there is no amount of additional drum beating that would have gotten us there. We did the best one could do under the constraints of the day.

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Geoff Graham is an Atlanta-based entrepreneur with deep experience in real estate development and software. His most significant prior ventures include the development of I’On, a mixed-use, 762 homesite community in Mount Pleasant, SC (1997 to present), and GuildQuality, a software-as-a-service business serving the residential construction industry (2002 to 2019).

During the first five years of I’On’s development, Geoff managed the neighborhood’s vertical and horizontal construction, recruited the builders and managed the building program, and was instrumental in the creation and administration of the neighborhood’s design guidelines. Since the completion of the first homes in 1998, I’On has earned accolades for its financial success, its exceptional design, and its environmental sustainability. I’On and its homes have been widely featured in both consumer publications and professional journals.

*the headline is taken from Geoff Graham’s reforwarded tweet here.

Eric Kronberg, a respected urbanist architect and developer in Atlanta, leads Kronberg Urbanist + Architects (Kronberg U+A), alongside Elizabeth Williams and their talented team. More than just designers, they are influential advocates for smart, sustainable development. They perpetually crank out insightful graphics—like the one above—that help illustrate key urban planning concepts. (Stay tuned for more OnHousing posts that build on their work as a launching point).

In this week’s post, we are going to unpack a graphic that showcases how minimum lot size regulations restrict housing opporunities.

VISUALIZING INCREMENTAL INFILL

In the headline drawing of this post, Kronberg illustrates how incremental housing reforms can transform a single block into a more connected, livable community. The comparison focuses on a 1.5-acre block, showing two versions:

1. THE ZONING WE HAVE – a typical sprawling suburban block.

2. THE ZONING WE NEED – an incrementally densified alternative.

In THE ZONING WE HAVE, we see a typical land use pattern of any southern city, which yields six single-family homes. This pattern is characterized by large lots with large setbacks and large backyards. It’s a pretty standard suburban form across house size and wealth spectrums. An alley is present, but it appears to serve no purpose. Notice how much space is available.

In THE ZONING WE NEED, the same block face is infilled with a combination of small single-family homes (often referred to as “starter homes”), duplexes, and accessory dwellings (ADUs). The original alley is repurposed as road frontage, while a second alley, installed midblock, improves connectivity. The plan yields 24 homes—and that’s without any big apartments or much traditional missing middle.

Increasing density fourfold, all while retaining the neighborhood scale, is quite a feat.

HOW THE SAUSAGE IS MADE

These kinds of housing gains are happening more and more across the country, thanks to zoning reforms like reducing minimum lot sizes, eliminating single-family-only zoning, repealing parking requirements, and establishing ADU rights as inalienable. Together, these changes are yielding huge benefits.

Kronberg articulates multiple benefits of these reforms, which I’ve translated into a shorter list here:

1. Increased tax efficiency generates more revenue per acre and puts cities on stronger financial footing.

2. More sustainable infrastructure lowers the per-household cost of utilities, parks, sidewalks, and other public amenities.

3. Diverse transit options improve the viability of walking, biking, and public transportation.

4. Decreasing reliance on public subsidies allows citizens to put their money towards building the city’s housing stock instead of paying large corporations.

5. Expanding lower-priced housing lessens the supply strain in the booming South and serves the starter markets (e.g., first-time buyers and extended families) abandoned by traditional development.

6. Reducing sprawl and enhancing walkability strengthens neighborhoods and community ties.

7. Reinforcing localism ensures housing reflects local styles, built by and for the people who live there.

These benefits are huge—so why do cities keep getting in their own way instead of making changes that would lead to a more sustainable future?

Eric Kronberg is a great person to answer this question.

For a long time, he’s had a front-row seat to Atlanta’s messy politics, consistently showing up at public meetings to push for projects and reforms that make housing more affordable. He’s a go-to architect for many of Georgia’s nonprofits and land trusts, providing the plans that turn their policy charters into reality. His extensive writing on the subject cements his role as a leading voice in the fight for better housing. (I recommend these three books penned by their office).

Kronberg is well versed in both Capital-A Affordable housing (state-subsidized and generally politicized development) and lowercase-a affordable housing (small-scale, non-politicized, incremental). Capital-A is a demand-side solution, while lowercase-a focuses on supply. Because of this, lowercase-a affordable housing depends almost entirely on zoning reform.

To emphasize the point that lowercase-a affordable housing is contingent on zoning reform, Kronberg added probable housing price info to the original graphic. This underscores how housing prices—ostensibly the #1 concern of many city governments now—can be substantially reduced with simple reforms.

There’s a longer presentation that walks through the math of this image, which I’ll cover in another post. But in short, it proves a clear mismatch between housing type and need: household sizes are shrinking, while new home sizes keep growing. Meanwhile, the market for small starter homes has collapsed, along with the supply of new homes in walkable neighborhoods. The result? A sustained downward pressure on affordability.

People are rightfully frustrated.

A small [but skilled] group of practitioners truly understands how to build housing more affordably—but they’re being blocked at every turn. Across the country, policies and regulations prevent them from doing their work, and their frustration is palpable.

In Atlanta, political inertia continues to handcuff property owners, stopping them from delivering lower-cost housing. Their exasperation is boiling over.

Kronberg puts it bluntly: “what if your city spent over $3M to rewrite zoning, all while 1) neglecting to demonstrably increase housing choices, 2) restricting housing options in accessory structures, and 3) imposing a draconian definition of family.” And why should we care about this scenario? “Because Atlanta.””

CONCLUSION

Real Estate Twitter (aka #ReTwit) Founding Father Sean Sweeney specializes in what I would call “Big Missing Middle,” while Eric Kronberg specializes in “Little Missing Middle.” Both are important to pay attention to because growth happens at the margins. It’s in these spaces that the right policy changes can truly transform cities and the lives of the people who live in them.

Kronberg’s work stands out because it’s scaled for the citizen developer—everyday people creating housing for their own communities. Historically, that’s exactly how most of our neighborhoods were built, and we’d all benefit from shifting back to that model.

He points to the city where I live, Durham NC, as a model to follow. Kronberg cites specific policies of ours as best-in-class:

• reduce minimum lot sizes

• allow duplex ADUs

• permit fee-simple ADUs

• remove limits on ADUs built on faith-owned property.

And he is right; Durham proves that strategic zoning changes make it possible to do something many cities struggle with: unlock more housing options without massive overhauls.

The most incremental zoning reforms include allowing ADUs, reducing minimum lot sizes, and permitting duplexes and lot splits by right. As Kronberg’s diagram illustrates, these small changes can transform a sparse, car-dependent city into a more walkable, connected community.

I have yet to see another way.

The fight for modest reforms will continue. Some cities will lead, others will follow, and many will resist affordability and access as long—and in as many ways—as they can. But for those who need housing and those who want to provide it, there are no workarounds; the only way is through.

That’s why I remain grateful for the work of folks like KronbergUA.

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This week, I am cross-posting the Messy City Podcast I did with Kevin Klinkenberg, recorded at CNU32 in Cincinnati last month.

Kevin has long been a leader in the industry, an architect, and a civic leader. He now devotes substantial time to advocating for better cities through various media efforts.

The Messy City

On Housing with Aaron Lubeck

Aaron Lubeck and I sat down in Cincinnati, during CNU 32, to talk a lot about housing, policy, and how to actually make change. Aaron writes a Substack called On Housing, where he frequently explores these issues. And, he’s one of the founders of Southern Urbanism…

Listen now

2 years ago · 1 like · Kevin

I share a lot with Kevin. We are similar ages, with similar urban development experiences and marginally successful book-writing carreers. He describes himself:

Born into the world as part of an overlooked and cynical generation, I've worked to overcome media narratives and self-important Baby Boomers for 48 years. That, and I've done a fair amount of work as an urban designer, architect, planner, form-based coder, redeveloper and wanna-be musician. I'm grateful for the few people per week that seem to enjoy this blog, and I wrote a book called "Why I Walk" in 2014 that sold nearly a few dozen copies.

I also appreciate his stanza on Daniel Burnham’s oft cities “Make no little plans - they have no magic to stir men’s blood", which, as Kevin points out, “on the next page of the Plan of Chicago, he also said this:

"It should be understood, however, that such radical changes as are proposed herein cannot possibly be realized immediately. Indeed, the aim has been to anticipate the needs of the future as well as to provide for the necessities of the present; in short, to direct the development of the city towards an end that must seem ideal, but is practical."

Kevin is an incrementalist through and through, like me. There are not enough of us. That matters, because placemaking - the art of creating remarkable and loved places within the built environment - is the exclusive domain of the incrementalist.

Kevin concludes:

Too often in the world of urban design, architecture and planning we forget to balance those two critical elements - the yin and yang of place-making: idealistic visions and practical realities; the human need for big plans and dreams and the individual's need to be able to contribute with small actions.  One cannot exist without the other. 

Cheers that. I appreciate Kevin’s work as a kindred spirit who defends small-scale development and perpetuates the thankless effort to recruit, train, and support the next generation of local developers who will rebuild our cities.

On the podcast, we discuss various topics and posts of mine:

I am Going to Bring Back the Sears Home

What’s Next for Jane Jacobs’ Sidewalk Ballet?

A Brief Detour to Honor My Old Lady

How North Carolina became a leader in building code reform to enable affordability.

I hope you enjoy the listen. And be sure to follow Kevin and his Messy City.

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In August of 2023, North Carolina became the first State to change its Residential 1-2 Family Residential Building Code to the 1-4 Family Code, a reform that will result in lower-cost triplexes & quads, more viable missing middle housing, and more flexible alignment with local zoning.

The reform (HB488) is potentially revolutionary for affordability. And no one is talking about it.

2 DETAILS

There are many moving parts, but here are the most critical ones:

1. Two building codes govern most American development: the 1-2 Family “Residential” Code (IRC) or the “Commercial” Code (IBC), which covers everything else;

2. The Commercial Code is substantially more expensive to operate in;

3. The Commercial Code requires sprinklers in residential units, metal stairs, higher soft costs, among others;

4. Subcontractors using the Commercial Code also cost substantially more.

At every level, requiring affordable housing to comply with the less affordable code makes housing less affordable.

Though North Carolina was the first State to adopt these reforms, cities are starting to take similar action at the local level. While most towns in Dillon’s Rule states do not have the right to regulate the building code locally (the exclusive domain of State government in North Carolina), cities like Memphis do.

In 2021, Memphis and Shelby County passed a similar reform, allowing up to 6 units to be governed by the Residential Code (effectively now a 1-6 Family Code).

Daniel Parolek of Opticos Design offered his kudos to the River City:

This is an extremely important and precedent-setting move by Memphis and Shelby County to remove one of the largest barriers that exists for the delivery of Missing Middle Housing. By establishing this precedent, I hope many other cities across the country follow their lead and make this important change to their local building code. It is absolutely necessary for cities and counties to deliver more attainable housing.

Parolek goes on to itemize some of the specific benefits of the reform:

• Modify the scope and definitions of the IBC and IRC to apply the residential code and all subject provisions to 3- to 6-unit structures.

• Remove the sprinkler requirement for buildings with 2-hour fire-rated walls and floor/ceiling assemblies.

• Limit public spaces to shared means of egress but allow upper-floor residences to share common egress.

• No longer require separate mechanical, electrical, and plumbing drawings.

• Consider how seismic provisions should apply differently to one- and two-family structures versus 3- to 6-unit structures.

  

3 HANLON’S RAZOR / WHY DID WE ELIMINATE AFFORDABLE HOUSING?

The problem is that American bureaus have regulated the most affordable forms of housing out of existence. Two motivations triggered the problem: ignorance and malice. Hanlon’s Razor instructs us to “never attribute to Malice that which can attributed to ignorance”. Both are present here:

WAS IT IGNORANT?

On the ignorance side, our ever-increasingly siloed bureaucracies are tasked with monolithic scopes independent and irrespective of other agencies.

The stormwater engineer could not care less about affordable housing.

The transportation director has no interest in building a diverse community.

It’s not the building inspector’s job to make affordable housing easier to build.

Perhaps they should be. Over at Southern Urbanism, Architect & Engineer Dr. Tony Sease wrote about the need for an overseeing office that could reconcile these differences and have the power to overrule departmental incongruences.

The failure to have a rational and empowered overseer inevitably results in regulatory fiefdoms that grow domains, raising the threshold of viability and making small projects impossible to execute. Over time, affordable all but disappears.

As city governments (particularly in progressive cities) move away from effective management and toward hollow vibes, oversight of the fiefdoms dissipates, and the problem becomes more acute.

The expansion of the fiefdoms breeds a more comprehensive ignorance, as no one is responsible for the overall results. Each independent department will make some loose claim of safetyism, enough to justify their control, and that will be enough to perpetuate the system. Without a determined, skilled, and empowered overseer, the system can only grow.

WAS IT MALICIOUS?

The old rules 1-2 Family rule forced 3 and 4-unit structures into the commercial code, which became cost prohibitive. Thus, the most affordable forms of housing produced in America were made unaffordable through misguided regulation and effectively legislated out of existence.

These penalties are partially intentional: One of the many ways that elites will eliminate poorer people in their community is to make the cost of lower-cost housing punitive (special permissions, parking mandates, etc.). Forcing triplexes in quadruplexes into the commercial code did precisely that.

Since the early 1970s, almost nobody has built 3 and 4-unit projects in Durham. In 2023, North Carolina fixed the #1 rule triggering the collapse in this unit type, which is the most affordable type anyone can build. The reform should open up extraordinary opportunities in the 3 and 4-unit housing that are the foundation to reestablish the missing middle.

Last week, demographer and urban economic trends writer Joel Kotkin penned a polemic in The National Review entitled Let America Sprawl. It quickly garnered 1 million views and was nearly ratioed by commenters. To those of us who follow land use debates across the political spectrum, all of this was wholly predictable.

Kotkin, Randy O'Toole, and Wendell Cox are the Three Horsemen of Suburbia. They are well-known contrarians. Often dismissed as conservatives, they mostly read to me as suburban apologists.

They are not wrong on a few points, which I will enumerate, but they are incorrect in their basic premise that people inherently prefer the suburbs in a free market. 

What undermines their vast writings is the fundamental truth that cities are not free markets, nor anywhere near free markets. While this truth is not the obligation of The Horsemen to reveal, it remains disappointing that all three seem deferential to others to do the difficult work of returning cities to the genetic DNA of their origin.

THE FUNDAMENTAL PARADOX OF URBANISM

Kotkin is correct in identifying the fundamental paradox of urbanism. Urbanism promises that cities should be cheaper. Shared amenities, less space per dwelling and person, network effects, housing variability, consumer choice, and economic elasticity should yield a higher quality experience at a lower per-unit cost.

But cities are not cheaper. They are not cheaper for a variety of reasons, all defying the basic math: cities often have more poverty, leading to sizeable social expense loads. Urban diversity yields complexity. Cities are more likely to be subjected to unproductive bomb-throwing politics. And cities are more likely to be subjected to land-use ordinances that are parasitical to their promise.  

All of these problems are solvable, and some are exacerbated by the type of policies that Kotkin and The Horseman recommend. Their most detrimental policy faux pas is the defense of suburban zoning applied to the urban form.

And this omission is the root of my response.

As zoning (which will always be a suburban construct) is forced upon urban grids, the market is not responding to great suburban options as much as it is rejecting bad urban ones. Humans are pushed and pulled; Kotkin believes the suburbs are pulling Americans. He forgoes that bad zoning (and the inelasticity inherently linked to it) may be pushing citizens, too. If San Francisco were not saddled with suburban zoning, it would have neither a housing shortage nor a mass exodus. Kotkin forgoes the fact that suburbs and suburban zoning are the primary constructs of the urban planning profession that he (and I) often critique.  

The thing is that cities are not naturally zoned. Suburbs are; that’s half of what makes them suburbs. In this sense, Kotkin is too clever by half.

It is the suburbs, not the city, that are the magnum opus of the American planning profession.

Kotkin's thesis implies that the suburbs are less regulated than cities. This is inaccurate, historically so. American suburbs have always been built to what New Urbanists call a climax condition. From their genesis, suburbs have been built to conform to peak regulation.

Except for the natural growth of the landscaping, how a suburb looks today is precisely how it will look in a century. The suburbs offer no flexibility for growth. Generally, innovators cannot improve a neighborhood or even a house. Inasmuch, Suburbs are antithetical to the entrepreneurial spirit of rugged individualism.

Critically, conservative writers discount the harm done to great American cities through restrictive regulation. Kotkin thinks the suburbs offer a better product on balance, except there is no balance here. This is an unlevel playing field. A full-frontal assault from suburban planning has subjected American cities to toxic suburban coding. In more than a few instances, this has proven fatal.

While I will argue such planning is problematic even on its home turf of suburbia, zoning is both ruinous and anti-American when retrofitted onto an urban fabric for which it was neither built nor intended.  

Suburbia is playing an away game, and breaking all the rules.

A conservative magazine like the NRO needs to point this out. The long tail of Woodrow Wilson's Administrative State (which conservatives loathe) is the American planning profession. Professor Wilson's dogma has been snuffed out of nearly every other profession and written off as a grandiose failure. However, the idea that highly educated non-vested "neutral" actors can govern the lives of everyone else predominately still exists only in one profession - land use. Zoning. The Museum of Wilson’s Administrative State is the American suburb. It leaves no oxygen for creative development. The suburbs are centrally-planned monotony, if not de jure, then de facto.

CONSERVATIVES ARE DEFENDING CENTRAL PLANNING, AND IT'S WEIRD

If defending traditional American values and the spirit of the founding, The National Review would argue that any suburb chartered after zoning's legal establishment in 1927 (via Euclid v. Ambler) knew what they were buying, but there are three moral truths about America's older historic cities:

1. Zoning was unconstitutional taking in 1927, 

2. Zoning remains unconstitutional today, and 

3. America's great cities should be returned to the pre-Euclid regulatory state so that urbanists can get on with their lives and suburbanites can get on with theirs

We could call it “The Great Sorting”. Urbanists and Suburbanists could each get what they want.

The crucial part of this vision, the re-upping of free markets in land use, is a level playing field. Kotkin does not discuss the level of this field nor the disease that zoning is to a city. He needs to. Otherwise, his writing comes off as suburban boosterism: win at all costs, damn the torpedoes.

THE SUBURBS AIN’T MANIFEST DESTINY

Kotkin is partially correct on the issue of manifest destiny and themes of ruralist redemption that presents through writers as vast as Wendell Berry and Paul Kingsnorth. But it is a stretch, to say the least, to conflate a DR Horton starter home with 'going back to the land'.

This is not manifest destiny.

The pastoral attraction to new homeowner stakeholding, which drove the country's id for the better part of two centuries, is not the same as suburban homeownership, with its carbon copy housing, inflexibility, and genetic coding for stasis.

While land holding is a critical component of Lockean liberalism - the American Dream - there is no minimum lot size qualifier applied to the construct. Nor should there be. Survey stakes can be hammered into the ground for an urban tiny home as they can for a suburban McMansion. Both are valid.

THE GREAT SORTING

If the cities are to be abandoned, as Kotkin seems to suggest, why not let them be? If they are the unredeemable hellholes he presents, why defend the oppressive zoning regulation that seeks to suburbanize urban residents against their will? Wouldn't a proper market advocate position demand that cities be returned to the system when great American cities and practically all our historic districts were constructed? All of which were built before the advent of zoning? 

Why wouldn't Kotkin argue for a 'Great Sorting', a bifurcation of lifestyle, where the suburbs can be suburbs and cities can be cities? His writing might have more reach if he did.

THE SUBURBS ARE A CHOICE

I split from some of my hard-core urbanist friends by acknowledging that the suburbs are a choice. It's not one I like, and I've spent most of my life fighting to restore the urban alternative. But I fully recognize that, as Loeb Fellow Charles Buki once said to me matter-of-factly, "Perfectly good people raise perfectly good kids in the suburbs." There are valid reasons people should want to live in the suburbs. 

Kotkin fails to defend a countervailing choice in cities. He fails to recognize the appeal and benefit of cities. He regularly pejoratives those who do. There are valid reasons people should want to live in the cities, too. And not all are elite, wealthy, or childless. Most are motivated by things other than maximizing the square footage of their home.

In his exclusive reliance on data, Kotkin falls prey to the same fallacies of modern researchers doing modern research in the modern world: data discounts all that cannot be measured.  

In relying exclusively on data, Kotkin discounts what cannot be measured, which is often what matters most. This is especially true in cities.

Cities are more than economic engines. They represent history, trade, innovation, love, excitement, wonder, and the American spirit - things that are incalculable yet significant. The (urban) University City Loop offers more excitement and wonder than (suburban) Chesterfield Mall ever will. Cities are simply more representative of the American spirit, and that is a thing that is both incalculable and does matter. 

My main critique of Kotkin is that he may be confusing what is actually a southern thing for a suburban thing. He may be confusing southern migration for suburban preference. People are moving South, but not exclusively to the suburbs. And, again, I suspect he is falling prey to a data signal trap.

There is no way to track southern migrants who want to live in the city but cannot find anything, so they settle for the suburbs.  

Kotkin's data cannot track urban-preferring migrants settling reluctantly in the suburbs.

Lastly, Kotkin is unnecessarily polemic in disparaging cities as places where we "force people back into denser areas." There is no forcing. People can and do choose where to go (The average American moves 12 times in their lives, many to urban areas).

Many do want walkable communities. Even if it is a minority who craves this lifestyle, who cares?  Why advocate for conformity to the majority?

Why couldn't 40% of Americans live in the mixed-use communities they want to? Or 4%? Mixed-use traditional neighborhoods are overwhelmingly popular when built; most are urban constructs in suburban settings, which tells us something about what people want.  

Kotkin is right that people leave highly-regulated, elite-driven, primarily blue states in favor of less-regulated, distributed, and incremental, primarily red states. But he is clearly discounting how many migrating transplants seek the urban life.

A whole mess of people moving to North Carolina from New York and California want to live in the city. I take phone calls from them almost weekly. To dismiss them as irrelevant is a disservice to urbanists and suburanists alike. 

It is reasonable for some to want predictability that no-changes-ever HOAs promise. I will give the suburbanists that. But it is unreasonable for a self-identifying free marketer to hoist such a vision on those seeking urban living. Urbanists should take a more forceful free-market stand against such invasive ideologies, particularly when peddled by ostensibly conservative magazines. The future of American cities depends on a defense of such urban values.  

The town of Caroline is anachronistic compared to its mother state of New York, which is famous for leviathan bureaucracies, complex governing systems, and modern machine politics.

In Nolan Gray’s new movie Arbitrary Lines: The Free Spirit of Caroline, the place couldn't feel farther from Gotham. It’s a country setting with what appears to have no bureaus, minimal governing systems, and a whole mess of individuals acting, well, individually. 

Caroline is as country as New York gets. It looks like it woke up from a coma and missed the 1927-present zoning era. In fact, The 200-square-mile working-class community has never had zoning. 

So, when zoning was recently proposed, it sparked a predictable backlash. The film, which is comedic at times, documents those events.

Arbitrary Lines premiered at the 2023 Better Cities Film Festival in Detroit and serves as a helpful study on multiple policy questions, none more qualifying than this one: 

Why do people who don’t have zoning fight to prevent it?

It doesn't take long for the film to establish that zoning prohibits a culture of scrappy entrepreneurship and elasticity.  Elasticity, the ability to ebb and flow with the chaotic realities of markets, is a pre-requisite to success in non-wealthy farm communities.  

A 7th-generation farmer knows that yesterday’s dairy farm is today’s cattle farm and tomorrow’s agritourism business.  Every application, fee, and special permission required to shift business models increases the risk of bankruptcy. The 7th generation farmer is keenly aware of these risks. You don’t know what risk feels like until you have to carry the burden of not failing your great great great great grandfather.

History shows that new zoning codes consistently and inappropriately overregulate innocuous uses. Codes require special permissions (through variances, rezoning, or amendments) for historically non-controversial improvements. 

The process of zoning subjects the applicant to an often-distressed discretionary review by non-vested, non-representative neighbors, who are rarely professionals and who frequently have their own unrelated agendas to propagate at the applicant’s expense. 

“We deny your variance because we don’t want to give it to everybody” is the common excuse.

Such responses perpetuate simultaneous death spirals that continue harmful codes and calcify a city’s ability to fix those same codes.

If historicism is the unfair judgment of yesterday’s people by today’s standards, then Caroline, New York is an exercise in presentism: judging today’s people by yesterday’s standards.

Here, residents are clearly concerned that zoning is a broad-brush bureaucracy, untuned to the realities of its rural life, with untold costs of conformity triggering perceived catastrophic risk to its prospective subjects.  

An anecdotal case study in the movie stands out.  A single code provision, common in latter-day planner dogma, requires parking to be prohibited in front of a house.  As is typical of central planning, it misses the critical caveat of transect-based coding that context matters. This “parking in the rear is better” principle should only apply to urban fabric, of which there is none in Caroline.  

As written, the parking stipulation would require this citizen’s large-lot event facility to ruin its pastoral views by parking all the patron’s cars smack in the middle of the event space.

“Sorry, them's the rules” is the presumed response, which the owner finds terrifying. The new rules would literally ruin his business.  What guarantee would he have of relief?

The movie, like the town, is a parade of these stories.  Caroline is filled with citizens fearful of the overreach of zoning, property rights abolitions, and the inevitable encroach of bureaucracy.  

An anti-zoning sign in front of a historic home that, under most planning regimes, would likely 1) qualify for landmarking and 2) be illegal to build today.

Nolan Gray has presented an unusual subject for a zoning talk. The arena for us urbanist nerds ain’t upstate New York, and Caroline is gun-firing, government-skeptic country folk. But the message is real and valuable across time and place. 

In this sense, Caroline is the perfect research control: a happy, modest community built upon local values, distributed property rights, and limited governance. What does it tell us when they clearly see zoning as a threat to it all.

Arbitrary Lines is a film that premiered at the Better Cities Film Festival in Detroit. It is produced by and stars Nolan Gray of California YIMBY, who authored a book under the same name. 

Here on the StrongTowns’ national podcast, I discuss my background, how cities are positioning themselves as national leaders in housing, and the transformative potentiality of incrementalism.

Full Podcast Here | For part 1, click here

Abby Newsham, moderator:

So I think we'll leave it there. Aaron, thank you so much. Is there anything else on SCAD that you'd like to share? That obviously sounds like it comes to a vote pretty quickly, 10 days from the day of this recording, which is pretty exciting. Are you feeling confident?

Aaron Lubeck:

Yeah, it's been a long haul. I mean, it's been 18 months of really detailed work and great engagement and a great team to work with. And I'm excited for my city because we've got a lot of needs here, but a lot of willingness to roll up our sleeves and take it on. And that's exciting because I think most cities take the easy route out and that's how we got into the mess that we're in today. So I'm excited.

Abby Newsham, moderator:

Well, I'll be rooting for you guys in Durham on the 21st of August and hopefully that passes through and is transformative for the city. Before we finish today, it is time for The Downzone, which is the part of the show where we can share anything that we have been listening to, reading, watching, or just anything that we have been up to these days. So, Aaron, I'm going to put you on the spot. What do you have for the down zone of today?

Aaron Lubeck:

Sure. So I was reading a book by Mark Mitchell that was recommended to me by Geoff Graham and his brother Vince Graham, who had developed the I'On development down in Charleston. Geoff and I were talking about Southern Urbanism, and was talking about a group called Front Porch Republic, which is a small blog that talks about the need to reestablish the small and incremental. Strong Towns would be all about them, and encourage you and Chuck to engage with them.

Front Porch basically says big things generally are bad. Big corporations are evil, and big government is bad. And we need to reestablish these small civic bonds, whether in neighborhoods, churches, builder’s guilds, or whatever, to rebuild America.

Anyway, Mark Mitchell wrote this great book called Plutocratic Socialism. He's a professor, actually the head of Front Porch Republic, and it kind of talks about the small narrowband of people who are very active in undermining housing reform in every city.

While the book is not about housing reform specifically, it talks about the plutocratic group, which in my world tends to be the wealthy homeowner that has ruled housing politics for 50 years, combined now with an underclass of a typically anti-capitalist activist group that wants to stop development because it makes money, or delays the revolution, or whatever it might be. He talks about how those groups are really, on paper, at odds with each other, but they actually partner on these issues because they need each other for relevancy.

He documents the historical background of why this awkward bedfellowing partnership occurred, and why they're the leading problem in most cities. That relationship was outlined in this book. So, it's a little wonky, but a great read and I'd recommend it.

Abby Newsham, moderator:

I love it. Yeah, it's really fantastic. Well, thank you, Aaron. So glad you were able to join me. Come on anytime. If you have an article that you'd like to share or if you have friends that have articles they want to talk about, it would be great to bring you guys on.

Aaron Lubeck:

Yeah, for sure. And of course, all the writers we have at Southern Urbanism, many of which you know because a big overlap with the Incremental Development Alliance and NTBA and CNU, but flip through that magazine because pretty much any of them are available to you, would love to talk with you as well.

Abby Newsham, moderator:

Yeah, that would be great. All right, well thanks Aaron and thanks everybody for listening to another episode of Upzoned. Keep doing what you can to build a strong town. Thanks, Aaron.

Aaron Lubeck:

Thank you.

This transcript had light editing for clarification purposes.