Introducing onHousing

Whats going on here?

Hi, I am Aaron.

Thank you for being here. This is a brand new blog, and I’m here to tell you what I hope to do with it. If you already know me, subscribe right here. ↙

If you don’t know me, here’s a brief introduction.

I’ve been in industry a long time, and I’ve been blessed to work with some of the most talented designers, builders, and urban developers on Earth.

I’ve led some cutting-edge (bleeding edge, really) projects furthering the frontier of historic preservation, green building, and affordable housing.

And I have a stack of dissatisfactions with all of it. No one (literally no one) is happy about the way we are building cities. The common denominator throughout this unhappiness is housing. Why?

• There’s not enough of it.

• What is built is uninspiring.

• Every year, sprawl gets worse, as does our ability to fix it.

Worse, there is no great place to learn how to fix it all:

• Traditional education is a black hole for citybuilding,

• Planners seem more focused on social justice narratives than site planning,

• Architecture schools teach modern and post-modern design rather than community building and

• You can’t go anywhere to study how to be an urban developer.

• Adding to this, mass media has a complete blind spot for business and seems genuinely incurious about how housing actually works.

Micromedia - mostly labor of love blogs & social - are where the truths can be found. Some amazing curations of thought can be found here, here, and here (and here, and here).

We are going to talk about all of this.

So join me. I will attempt to convey everything I have learned in twenty years of practice, including all my mistakes, in hopes you don’t have to repeat them.