Podcasts about new urbanists

Trilith is a newly built (and growing) walkable community located next to Trilith Studios in Atlanta, Georgia.  It is one of the most successful TNDs and New Urbanists communities in the country.   Rob Parker, as President, leads a team of designers, architects, planners and builders in creating the 235 acre master-planned residential and mixed use development.  Rob is a transformational leader with a focus on people, and has extensive experience in town building, commercial and retail development, music entertainment, non-profit leadership, marketing, branding and capital development. This episode is a must for developers, investors, planners, architects, engineers or city officials interested in creating more walkable, mixed-use, people-first places.  Hear directly from someone who has actually done it successfully, and learn about the keys to success, as well as some of the pitfalls.  Trilith is built on the principles of new urbanism, with a focus on walkability, sustainability, and a deep sense of community. The vision of Trilith is to create a town for creatives, artists, storytellers, and makers, where everyone feels loved, served, inspired, and connected. The community is designed to promote longer, better, and happier lives for its residents. Trilith is a successful example of a people-centered, walkable community that prioritizes sustainability and quality of life.  TAKEAWAYS Trilith is a walkable community in Atlanta, Georgia, built on the principles of new urbanism. The community is designed to promote longer, better, and happier lives for its residents. Trillith is focused on creating a sense of community and connection among its residents. The community is committed to sustainability and has implemented practices such as geothermal heating and cooling and the preservation of green spaces. Trilith is a people-centered, walkable community that prioritizes sustainability and quality of life. The development focuses on creating smaller footprint, energy-efficient homes and incorporates sustainable technologies like geothermal energy and solar power. Trilith emphasizes the importance of community and mental health, offering enrichment activities and a progressive school. The financing of the project involved patient capital and partnerships with builders and investors. The success of Trilith has led to increased property values and a positive impact on the surrounding area. CHAPTERS 00:00 Introduction to Trilith and Rob Parker 03:01 Creating a Walkable Community for Creatives 07:47 Promoting Longer, Better, and Happier Lives 14:42 Fostering a Sense of Community and Connection 18:08 The Freedom of Living in a Walkable Environment 20:29 The Impact of COVID-19 on Trilith 29:05 The Importance of Sharing the Vision 37:48 Commitment to Sustainability and Green Practices 40:02 Creating a Sustainable and Walkable Community 41:30 Incorporating Sustainable Technologies in Home Design 44:20 Prioritizing Community and Mental Health 49:48 The Financing and Partnerships Behind Trillith's Success 55:23 The Positive Impact of Trilith on Property Values and the Surrounding Area CONNECT WITH ROB & TRILITH Rob's Linked In Trilith's Real Estate Instagram Trilith's Foundation Instagram Trilith's Facebook Home Website: Trilith Town Website: Town at Trilith Variety Article on Trilith CONNECT WITH BUILDING CULTURE https://www.buildingculture.com/ https://www.instagram.com/buildingculture/ https://twitter.com/build_culture https://www.facebook.com/BuildCulture/ CONNECT WITH AUSTIN TUNNELL https://www.instagram.com/austintunnell/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/austin-tunnell-2a41894a/ https://twitter.com/AustinTunnell https://playbook.buildingculture.com/

Of all the parts of this enjoyable conversation with Seth Zeren, now of Providence, RI, the part I liked the most was this quote:The worst fight is with your allies that betray you.The quote, which is mostly about perception, says a lot about people who are frequently in heated agreement with each other, but find themselves disagreeing on something that's very minor in the big picture. We discuss this as we discuss his post called, “When New Urbanists and YIMBYs fight.”Seth has a great Substack, talking about all the overlap in his interests from city planning to development and more. His path and his passion are impressive. From his early days working in local government, to now the cold, hard reality of making development projects work. And what's next? Perhaps some place management, perhaps some housing policy advocacy, perhaps just more really interesting redevelopment projects.Find more content on The Messy City on Kevin's Substack page.Music notes: all songs by low standards, ca. 2010. Videos here. If you'd like a CD for low standards, message me and you can have one for only $5.Intro: “Why Be Friends”Outro: “Fairweather Friend”Transcript:Kevin (00:01.269)Welcome back to the Messy City podcast. This is Kevin Klinkenberg. I'm excited today to have Seth Zarin here with me on the podcast. Seth and I have met in the past and corresponded a little bit. Seth has a sub stack that I definitely recommend called Build the Next Right Thing. And he's in Providence, Rhode Island, which is actually, I think, one of the sort of most underratedsmaller cities in the country. I've always really liked Providence, enjoyed it. So Seth, welcome to the podcast. I know we're going to have a lot of good things to talk about. We're going talk some housing and some other stuff, but glad to have you on so we can do this.Seth Zeren (00:43.574)Thanks Kevin, it's nice to be here.Kevin (00:46.261)I think, you know, Seth, I want to kind of start by talking about you're another guy who has a really interesting path and background into becoming into the development world, which is what you're doing now, but certainly not at all where you started. And I wonder if you could kind of walk people through your professional background and then even like why you wanted to do a sub stack.in the first place, as some of us silly people do to put thoughts out in the world.Seth Zeren (01:19.862)Yeah, absolutely. I usually introduce myself when I meet people by saying that I'm a former climate scientist, recovering city planner, turned real estate developer. I usually get a laugh on recovering. Much like people who have all sorts of addiction issues, city planning is something that you always kind of in the back of your head, always kind of want to work on, but can be really challenging.Kevin (01:35.381)Ha ha ha.Seth Zeren (01:48.918)I'm actually from California. I grew up in the San Francisco suburbs, south of the city in Silicon Valley, basically. And by the time I graduated high school, it was quite clear that I would never be able to afford to live there. At that point, houses were selling for about a million dollars for a little ranch. Now it's about $3 million. And so by the time I left for college, I sort of knew that the housing situation there had been a little bit of a mess.broken so much that it was really unlikely that I would be able to find a good quality of life there for myself at that time. In college, I ended up studying geology and climate science. So I was a geology major, geosciences major, and I narrowly averted the PhD. I dodged it, fortunately, and I found myself really becoming interested after college. I went and lived in South Korea for a year and I taught English there. AndIt was such a different experience than growing up in an American suburb or in a small town where I went to college. And it really got me thinking a lot. And when I came back to the U S and I went and worked at a boarding school while I was figuring out what I wanted to do with my life. And I started to read about cities and urbanism and architecture. And I realized that, Oh, actually at the time I thought I wanted to go to school and do architecture, but I was really intimidated by portfolio and drawing. And I had, I was a scientist. I mean, I could do data.I understood geology, but, um, so I was really intimidated by that. I ended up going to an environmental management program at Yale where I could kind of moonlight in law and architecture and business. And so that was kind of my entree. And I discovered I really liked zoning at the time. Uh, and I like to say like, I like board games and zoning is basically just the biggest board game imaginable. It's a huge map, bunch of colored spaces and a really long rule book, which was totally my jam. And.Kevin (03:38.485)Yeah. Yeah.Seth Zeren (03:46.038)So I was a zoning, big zoning nerd. I interned with the planning department, but you know, in between the two years of graduate school and then got a job as a zoning official after graduate school for Newton, Massachusetts, which is kind of that wealthy first ring suburb outside of Boston where the doctors and professors go to have children. And, uh, I was there for about three years before I kind of realized this was not the place for me. I wanted to do stuff. I wanted to shake things up and.One of the dynamics you'll encounter when you find a sort of a wealthy sort of trophy suburb, right, is that people buy there because they like what it is. Right. So the political dynamic in a place like Newton, like many wealthy suburbs around many cities in America is people are buying a particular place and they want it to stay that way. That's what they bought. And so there's a real change aversion there, which was just a bad fit for someone in their twenties, whose master's degree and wants to get stuff done. And.I had also at the time had the opportunity to work with a bunch of developers. And this was coming out of the financial crisis. So there wasn't a lot happening right away, but slowly, slowly things started to get back in gear. And after about three or four years there, I decided I was going to jump ship from the, from the planning side and eventually found myself working at a development shop as a development manager, kind of coming in to do the permitting work. Right. So I just basically switched sides. I was going to go do permitting for the developer.moving complex projects through design review and master plan approval and stuff like that. And I did that for my sort of early apprenticeship for about three or four years. And got to the point where, you know, I got married, we thought about buying a house and realized Boston was also too expensive. So we started considering other places and Providence was nearby. We'd visited, we had friends here. And at the time, certainly it was massively more affordable than the Boston Cambridge area.So we moved down here about eight, maybe nine years ago, about. And so I was working as a development manager, you know, for a larger firm. And then when I came down here, I was still working remotely, but I connected with some local developers and eventually joined a local firm, Armory Management Company, which is a 35 year old, almost 40 year old partnership now that has done historic rehab.Seth Zeren (06:09.782)Main Street revitalization ground up in field development and came on board here, you know, also as a development manager and kind of worked my way up. Now I'm a partner and working on kind of the future of the firm and future of development in the Providence area. So that's kind of my, my origin story. It's one path. I haven't met a lot of other people who've come through the planner path into development. I would say that I was one of those people that you probably remember this, Kevin, you know, whatever eight, nine, 10 years ago at CNU.There was this whole conversation about why are you working for shitty developers? You know, to architects, planners, engineers, go be your own. And I took that very much to heart and was trying to find a way to do it. And I've kind of managed to find a way to do it, come through that.Kevin (06:54.709)Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I have met a few other folks who kind of started in the planning route and then ended up in development. But yeah, you're right. There's not too many. I mean, one thing I'm curious about, Seth, so like I'm a Midwestern or so. I don't have that experience of growing up someplace and then realizing like I'm never going to be able to come back. I mean, so a lot of Midwesterners like myself leave at some point.And then often we find our way back home, but it's like, and there may, there's lots of reasons why people do the things, but there's never seems to be this like logistical issue that says, well, I'm just not going to be able to afford to come back where I grew up. What, what's that? And what's that like to at some point have this realization in the place you grew up in, which you probably have some really fond feelings and memories for that you just, you weren't going to be able to make it back or you weren't going to be able to afford to.make it back. That must be a strange feeling.Seth Zeren (07:55.414)It is, and I will say it becomes a lot stranger when you have your own kids, which I have now. I have two young children and we go back to California, you know, once maybe twice a year visit my parents who are still in the house I grew up in. And you know that neighborhood that I grew up in, you know, hasn't built. More than a couple net new homes in the last 50 years, right? Homes get torn down and they get replaced by bigger homes, but.Kevin (08:00.501)Yeah, sure.Seth Zeren (08:24.246)There's no net additional homes. But my parents raised three kids in that house who all have their own households. My parents are still in that house. So sort of mechanically, if you have a neighborhood that doesn't add any homes, you're essentially, but you have, but you have children, those children have to leave, right? Mechanically, right? And if you then multiply that across an entire region, well, then they have to leave the whole region, which is like why people have to leave California. And I, so I have a very,like complicated relationship with it. It's like, obviously, it's my home, it has like a smell and weather and just like the culture that is what I grew up with. It's it's I have nostalgia for that. But I also go whenever I go back there, I'm like, this place makes me crazy. Because it's not like you couldn't build more buildings, you know, you couldn't, it's not like the soil can't support more buildings, right? There's no physical limitation, really. It's the self imposed limitation. And then when you go back, especially,after the last 20 years or so, and you look, you know, here's a region in the world that is the current sort of nexus of tremendous wealth accumulation, right, the Bay Area. And what did we get for it? Right, we got kind of mediocre drive it strip malls, and the, you know, single family houses that go for three and a half million dollars to $5 million. You know, it's similar times in the world, we got, you know,London, Paris, New York, Chicago, Shanghai, Tokyo, like these metropolitan areas were built and there's this tremendous physical capital that's created by economic growth. But in the Bay Area, it's, it's, it's, it's, so it's kind of depressing for me. I feel like it's helpful to go back as a, as like a cautionary tale, you know, it's, it's a, it's a practice, you know, you have to go to the meditation retreat and struggle. And that's a little bit like what it is for me. Um,So you would ask why I write and so I'm a full -time developer. I run, you know, commercial development, residential development, run commercial leasing, a lot of architecture design permitting, you know, I would say, you know, there's a lot of different backgrounds. One can bring into the development world and all of them come with different strengths. Uh, being the planner background gives me a lot of facility with permitting. And so zoning is an area where we're really effective zoning historic.Seth Zeren (10:50.74)neighborhood relationships, all that kind of stuff. And then finding value in buildings that other people don't see because we look around at what other people are doing in other parts of the country and we're able to import those ideas and try things out. Other people have different advantages that they bring. The reason I write is probably like you, I've got like some thoughts in my head that I have to get out. And, you know, development is a great practical.you know, craft practice, you know, and it's, I mentioned, I think earlier apprenticeship, like there are a few schools that teach development, real estate development, kinda, but mostly they teach what we think of institutional development. So if you want to go build a skyscraper, go to MIT or Columbia. Fine.Kevin (11:37.333)Yeah, MIT's got those great courses and everything else that, yeah.Seth Zeren (11:39.51)Yeah, and like, totally fair. Like, that's a reason that's a thing that makes sense in the world, but it's not going to help you, you know, renovate a triple decker or, you know, put up an ad or or renovate a Main Street building. It's just not the skill set. They're not teaching that. So it's an apprenticeship. I mean, it's still really an apprenticeship job. You have to go and you have to go through a lot of stuff and struggle and you see all the pain and suffering and you go through the stress andKevin (11:53.877)Yeah. Yeah.Seth Zeren (12:08.726)You start to learn stuff and it's one of those jobs. There's so much to learn that you, you know, here I am 40 a partner doing a bunch of development work and I'm learning stuff every day, right? And we're all learning stuff every day. So it's it's really satisfying in that way, but. It's not necessarily intellectual job, right? I mean, thinking about stuff is important. Math is important. Those are all relevant things, but it's not the only thing that matters. And so I write because trying to figure out some stuff, right? Trying to figure out.for myself, but then also how to explain things to other people. Um, cause one of things I say to people is that, and I learned this when I became a developer is that like as a developer, I had more in common with the blue collar tradespeople without a college degree in terms of my understanding of the built environment than I did with someone who had my equivalent class background, education, income level, like an attorney or something, right?They live in a house that they bought from someone else, right? They are a consumer of the built environment, but they know very little about how it gets built. They don't get under the hood. But conversely, like I, you know, the plumber and I under, you know, we're in it together. Now we have very different jobs. We might, you know, we're having a different experience of it, but we both are seeing this world. We're both participating in the making of stuff. And so we end up with this very different environment. And then.because of the way we've regulated the built environment, now there's this huge chasm between the people who build the cities and the people who consume the cities that are built for them. Because people don't build much for themselves or for their cousin or for their neighbor.Kevin (13:44.533)Yeah, yeah, that's a, I mean, that's a really interesting point. I like that Seth. And it sort of resonates with me too. And, you know, in my experiences in design and development and you get some of that in architecture too. If you're the kind of an architect who you spend a lot of time doing construction administration or on job sites, you really, I think get a very different feel for that than if you're just kind of working in schematic design all the time. But yeah, that art of.creating things. And this is what I kind of often tell people about development. One of the things that just completely, like routinely frustrates me is this sort of parody of developers that's put out in the world. It's like, you know, as the black hat evil people trying to, you know, ruin cities and, and not this understanding that actually, and not that there aren't those people, there are some, you know, there are crappy people in every field. But most developers are just simply in the act of creating things that other people are going to use.Seth Zeren (14:36.278)Yeah.Seth Zeren (14:44.022)That's true. And I say that all the time as well. And I would add to that, that one of things that's interesting about development, right, coming from planning. So like real estate or city planning, right? Graduate degrees, conferences, magazines, there's even a licensure, right? You get your AICP, go to the conference, get the magazine. It's a profession. Real estate development isn't really a profession.Kevin (14:44.181)Like that's the whole point.Seth Zeren (15:11.254)You get $2 million and buy a CVS, you're a real estate developer. There you go. You put it on your business card, it's your real estate developer. So there's no professional boundaries for good and for ill. I mean, sometimes I think the boundaries around some of these professions are actually really harmful, but you kind of know what you're going to get. You know what the professional culture is and you kind of know how it changes and you know the institutions. Development really doesn't have any of that. Even the Urban Land Institute, ULI, which is a major player still like,compared to like the APA and planning is minuscule. And so like part of the challenges is that, so that's one piece of it. It's not really a profession. The other piece of it is that one of the things that's happened in the 20th century is we blew up our development culture, right? We had an ecosystem of building places, you know, that was the design, the construction, the operations, the leasing, the materials.the trades, there was a sort of ecosystem of it, and we kind of blew it up. We radically transformed it over a short period of decades. And so there's no continuity. So when people do development, there's not a sense of there's any kind of private constraint or private rules. So it feels even less like there's a profession. There's not like a coherent culture, we're going to build more of that, or we're going to evolve incrementally from a coherent culture of building.We're just going to build whatever you end up. That's where you end up with the like two story building with a mansard. That's like with the weird landscaping. It's just this weird Chimera because the developer and to a large extent, the architects have no grounded. There's, there's no like lineage they're working from. There's no continuity. They're just throwing stuff at the wall, you know,Kevin (17:00.341)Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I think one of the other aspects is that in development, so many of the players in the non -institutional world are entrepreneurs. At their heart of hearts, they're entrepreneurs. And it's hard to gather together a whole group of entrepreneurs who are, in some sense, in competition with each other all the time, to feel like a common sense of purpose.Seth Zeren (17:25.174)Yeah, and they're often grinding for their own private gain, which in many parts of the United States is sort of seen as not good, right? Profit is bad to a lot of people. And I think that's unfortunate because while certainly people can do bad things and that's not good, making a profit from doing good things is good. It's a good sign. It means you get to do more of it, right? We say we have to make a profit because that's what we, that's the...Kevin (17:30.101)Yeah.Seth Zeren (17:53.062)seed corn for the next project, right? If we ate all of our seed corn, we would have no next project, right? And if we run out of seed corn, we all starve, right? So you don't get to lose money very many times in real estate before you're out of the game. So it's...Kevin (18:05.685)Yeah, well, and nobody bemoans the local cafe or the barbershop or whomever from making a profit. We all want them to make a profit and succeed, but for some reason, the local developer in a business that's far riskier and more expensive, it's like we completely beat them up about the idea that they actually need to make money to keep going.Seth Zeren (18:22.326)Yeah.Seth Zeren (18:27.606)Yeah. And I think part of it is that there is part of this change in building culture, right? Is that there is where there is more of, or a greater percentage of the built of the new development is sort of seen as done by outsiders for short -term gain. And then they're gone. You know, you'll you've talked to other folks in the incremental development world between the farmer and the hunter, right? And it's we're, we're 90%, 95 % hunters now, you know, instead of 25 % hunters. And that just really changes.Kevin (18:41.397)Yeah. Right.Kevin (18:48.661)Yeah, sure.Seth Zeren (18:56.918)the relationship. So we're a local firm. I work in the neighborhoods in which we live. We work down the block from our projects. If we do a bad job, I have to look at it every day. People know who I am. They're going to yell at me. Like there's a level of responsibility. The profits are most, many of the profits are being reinvested again locally into the next project or into donations to local organizations. So it gets it, you know, not, it's not just as a matter of credibility, but as a matter of like the actual development culture and ecosystem, it's just a better way of life. Um,I think one of the things that's key though about the developer image, right? Is that there was this real period and formative period for, for you and for me, like in the 60s, 70s, 80s of the real estate developer is always the villain, right? And every hallmark movie and every, you know, real estate developers are always the bad guys. And it's a really easy trope, right? It's, it's, it's change for, you know, we're going to change something that's here now that's good for profit, you know, and then they're going to be gone. Um, we don't have any valorous.Kevin (19:37.811)Mm -hmm. Mm -hmm. Sure.Seth Zeren (19:56.442)examples of the real estate developer in popular culture. And I think if I had a magic wand, I would like I would have some great popular sitcom about, you know, a real estate developer, young Latino builder in LA doing interesting stuff and growing over the course of seasons and be hilarious because there's so much tragic comedy and development. So if anyone out there wants to pitch a show to Hollywood, that's that's what I would pitch. Oh, my God, no, that's not me.Kevin (20:19.893)Well, I think you've got your next screenwriting gig. So, give us an example of a project that you're involved with now, something you're working on to get people sent to what you're doing.Seth Zeren (20:31.798)Yeah, so yeah, I'll give two quick examples. So we just finished a rehabilitation of an historic structure, four story masonry building that was converted back to residential, right? It had been turned into actually a nursing home. It was first as a hospital than a nursing home in the 20th century. It was originally built as four brick row houses. And so we brought that back to residential. That just finished last summer, 12 units. And that project was really great. It's really beautiful building.We are a little bit counter -cultural in some times what we do. So we built, in part following the logic of the building, because we were doing a federal historic tax credit project, we didn't want to torture the building. So the units are large. We have, you know, 1500 square foot, two bedroom, two bath apartments, which is on current construction, like weird. It's just, they're really big and they're expensive as a consequence of being big. But what we're finding is there are people who will like nice stuff, and they're willing to pay.more for an apartment. And it's still cheap compared to New York or Boston. It's expensive in Providence, but there are people who will pay that. And right now we're working on the second phase of that project. So that's probably 26 unit building. We're going to try to get some three bedroom apartments in that, which is again, sort of philosophically, we think it's important that there are places where families could live in multifamily housing. It's on a park. It's a beautiful location. And then the project we just started,As we acquired a 50 ,000 square foot mill building in a kind of old industrial area of the city that has, it's one of those things where the previous owner kind of ran out of money and attention. So some things got done, but not other things. So we're finishing that up and that project, we are actually going to complete sort of the previous owner's plan, which was to create modestly priced commercial spaces. So we, in our portfolio, about 50, 50 residential and commercial, which isn't.necessarily by strategy. It's just sort of where we've ended up. Uh, but I think on the margin, we're a little bit more comfortable with commercials than the typical developer or landlord in our area. So because we run so much of it and it's full, I mean, we're 95, 97 % full and commercial across 300 and something thousand square feet. Um, and that's because we price to rent it, you know, and we take a good job caring for it. Uh, we follow the advice of making things smaller if they don't rent.Seth Zeren (22:57.878)Right? So if you make them smaller, then you make the rent smaller, which means more people can rent it. Um, and there's turnover, but you have a reusable unit, just like an apartment, people move right into it, uh, run their business out of that. So it's been good. I mean, you know, who knows things could always change, but we see a lot of value in, you know, one of the things that happened in American cities is disinvestment and white flight took place was not only did the people leave, but I'll sort of all the businesses.So it's like, what is your dentist? Where's your doctor's office? Where's your accountant? Where's your graphic designer? Or, you know, where's your retail shops, you know, your salons, your banks, your restaurants, your bars and restaurants and bars usually come first, but that's only a piece of the ecosystem. You know, it's a whole, you know, you need gyms and retail stores and yoga studios. And I know that sounds kind of trite, but it's sort of a, a, a curating kind of orientation. So this building, part of the strategy is to create a building that is safe.and modestly priced and not pristine so that it's a building in which people can do work. So it's artists, fabricators who have real businesses but need a space to operate their real business. It's not just a crazy building, spray painting the walls, but a reasonable building, not too expensive, not too fancy, but safe. Sprinklers and a roof that doesn't leak. So that's kind of our current project.Kevin (24:16.149)Yeah. Yeah. That's a great model. It reminds me a little bit of one of Monty Anderson's projects in South Dallas, sort of a similar deal, large former industrial building and essentially a minimal, very minimal tenant finish, but incredibly flexible. And if it's priced right, it, you know, in his case, at least up, you know, very quickly. That's a cool model. So I didn't really have any, a whole lot of personal experience withProvidence probably until the CNU was hosted there in what was that? Mid 2000s or so. Which was the best Congress up to that point and the best one until we hosted one in Savannah, of course. And anyway, I was really impressed by Providence. I thought it was...just an incredibly interesting city, very walkable, really cool architecture everywhere, nice downtown. Just seemed like it had a ton of assets, especially in that region. And like you said, priced very differently than Boston or New York. And so I'm curious about the last decade or so, what's going on in Providence. How's the market there? How are things changing? And as a...more of like a third tier city, what do you see that's different compared to some of the larger markets?Seth Zeren (25:47.094)Well, I think that the big story of the last 10 years is that we're no longer kind of isolated on our own. And I don't know if that's mostly a combination of remote work or if it also has something to do with just how expensive Boston and New York have become and other cities. And Providence has seen some of the highest year over year property appreciation in the country. So you're right. It's a nice place to live, you know, and then if you're paying, you know,$3 ,500 a month for, you know, kind of crappy two bedroom apartment in Somerville, you move to Providence and you can get a really nice apartment for $3 ,500 or you can save a bunch of money. And so that it's not so similar for me, right? We moved down here because it was cheaper. And so that adds demand. It adds demand in the upper end of the market. So a big part of what's happening in Providence, Rhode Island is, is that there's a relatively small number.but of people with a fair amount of resources, income and capital moving here. And the state chronically, because it's sort of been tucked away for a long time, it has very little home construction, right? We are the last, second to last, third to last in per capita home construction every year for the last few decades. And so the intersection of those two things is causing a really crazy housing spike and a lot of angst.And for myself, this is one of the places where like my own experience growing up in the Bay Area and then having my own kids has really hit home because, you know, I know in 20 years, I'm still going to need a house to live in. And my two kids are probably each going to want their own house to live in or apartment. Right. So I either got to build them one. They're going to buy yours or they got to leave. It's math. Right. And so it's put the question of housing shortage kind of on the sharp end of the stick for me personally.Right? Is, you know, am I going to be able to see my grandchildren more than once or twice a year kind of thing? You know, and that's a big deal. Right. And I know people don't quite appreciate it yet. I feel a little bit like a harbinger of doom sometimes because in Rhode Island, the feeling is like this could never happen here. Right. Because we're kind of this backwater sort of economically hasn't done well since deindustrialization. You know, there's some bright spots, but it's a little tough and nice quality of life, but not too expensive. And that whole script.Seth Zeren (28:13.142)of worked for a generation or two, but it's not relevant anymore unfortunately. And then that psychic cultural transformation is going to be really hard.Kevin (28:23.541)So coming from the background that you came from, how do you compare the development or the regulatory apparatus in Rhode Island and in Providence compared to places you've worked or pros and cons and what's going on there?Seth Zeren (28:36.086)Oh boy.Seth Zeren (28:41.494)Yeah, when I go to CNU and I'd say I'm from New England, they're like, how do you work there? Because it's hard. Yeah, we're more heavily regulated region. I think that in some ways that's beneficial to someone like me, right? If you're good at navigating the rules, then it's actually to your advantage to work in a regulated market because there's, you I'm not competing on how cheaply I can put up drywall. I'm competing on who can come up with the most creative use of land and get through the regs.Kevin (28:45.685)Ha ha ha ha.Seth Zeren (29:13.686)It's, you know, Providence itself has a mod, what I would call like a modern zoning ordinance. It's got a lot of, you know, there's things I would quibble with, there's things I would change, but it's basically a functioning ordinance that like does the right things more or less, right? And which is great. We mostly work in Providence. I'd say the rest of the state, like most of the rest of New England, it's still like 1955 and there's no...resources, no political impetus to like really fix that yet. I've, I've helped one of my responses is I helped found last year a group called Neighbors Welcome Rhode Island, which is a sort of strong towns meets UMB type or organization that we're still kind of launching a website now. We're working on legislation, state level legislation, and also trying to support local organizing in these towns.Seth Zeren (30:14.998)So it's a, it's, it's, you know, very similar to the markets I'm used to. It's a new England place. Everyone's in everyone else's business. The place has been inhabited buildings on it for, for, you know, hundreds of years. I think one thing that's always interesting about, about new England though, you know, compared to the national conversation is the missing middle is not missing here. Like our cities are made out of triple deckers, twos, threes, fours, sixes all over the place.Kevin (30:37.653)Mm -hmm.Seth Zeren (30:43.062)Our problem is we don't know what comes next. So a city like Providence right now, the only plan is, and this is true, Boston and these places, you can, sure, you can build on the vacant lots and there's a bunch of vacant lots and you can build those for a while. There's gonna be some bad commercial buildings. You can build on those for a while. There's some old industrial land. You're gonna build on that for a while. But in a different way, but similar to the regions where everything's zoned single family and it's built out single family, you can't add anything.to the bulk of the neighborhoods, which are zoned for two and three family homes, because there's already two and three family homes there. And what we don't have, and I don't think anyone has an answer to this, is how do you create a building typology and a business model and a regulatory framework, building code, zoning code, et cetera, to add density to those neighborhoods, to take a three -family neighborhood and bring it to the next increment.whatever that is, because I don't, I don't think we have a model for that other than to go to a full like five over one big apartment building, but the land assemblage there is really prohibitive. So what's the next thing that's denser than three families on 5 ,000 square foot lots, but isn't a big commercial building. And I don't think we have an answer for that yet. I mean, as a urbanist architecture development community, and we certainly don't have a regulatory framework that will allow us to build it either. So that's like an R and D project. That's sort of a back burner curiosity of mine.Kevin (32:08.981)Does the regulatory framework allow you to build the triple -deckers in place?Seth Zeren (32:14.198)Uh, under zoning. Yeah, kind of under building code. No, right. Cause triple deckers are commercial code. So you need sprinklers. So you can't build them. The cost difference. You'd just build a big two family instead of building a three family. It's a much better strategy. So one of the things that neighbors welcome is proposing this legislative cycle to follow on North Carolina's example and Memphis's examples to move three, four, five, six family dwellings into the residential code. And, you know, with no sprinklers, a single stair. Um,And, you know, we'll keep the two hour rating, just add more drywall. Okay, fine. But, you know, that's one of the things we're proposing along with a single stair reform for the small apartment buildings. But yeah, I mean, it's a chicken and the egg, right? There's no point coming up with the prototype and you can't build it. But then no one wants to reform the building code because there's no prototype that makes sense that people are excited about. So it's really kind of trapped. And so, you know, that's an interesting challenge that we struggle with.Kevin (33:14.069)Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's an interesting thing to think about what that next increment to would be beyond the freestanding, you know, triple deckers and stuff like that. Because, you know, I guess the first thing that comes to mind as you start to think about neighborhoods more like you would see in New York or Boston, certain parts of those cities that went to like five and six story walk up buildings that, yeah, yeah. And they're not.Seth Zeren (33:39.476)Buildings that touch. That's the big thing.Kevin (33:43.931)really townhouses wouldn't call them townhouses, but they might be like a five story walk up. Like you'd see, you know, on the upper East or upper East side or upper West side or something like that.Seth Zeren (33:49.598)Yeah.Seth Zeren (33:52.982)Yeah, there's two tiers, I think. There is a version that's more about lot subdivision, right? So we have decently sized lots and three families are big, but you might be able to get some more houses on them or bigger versions. And then I certainly moving to the part where you have party wall construction and the buildings that touch, you recover a bunch of lost area to thin side yards that no one can use. That tier is really interesting because you could probably keep them as owner occupant.Right? They'd be small, you know, two, three, four families, but on smaller piece of land, you know, buildings that touch whatever the next year above that, you know, which is like a single stair elevator, five, six stories, you know, 20 apartments. That's a commercial loan. It's a commercial operator. And, you one of the virtues of the triple decker, right, is that you have a distributed ownership, right? So that it's not just.You know, we have tons of landlords in the state, you know, because everyone I own, the triple decker I live in, right? Everybody owns, you know, a two family, a three family mom, grandma's two family, right? It's just it, there's so many opportunities for people to be small landlords for good and for ill, mostly I think for good, but there are, there are some limitations to it. Um, you know, so when I look around at international examples, right. You know, so for example, I teach real estate development on the side, cause I really care about bringing more people into this profession and not profession trade.craft, whatever. And I had some European students last fall, and I brought them to Providence on a field trip, took them around my neighborhood, which is, you know, to native Rhode Islanders like the hood. It's like the inner city. Ooh, scary. And they're like, this is a very nice suburb, right? Because to them, a bunch of detached two and three family dwellings with a few vacant lots in between them or parking lots, this is suburban density. And they're wrong. And they're not wrong. They're right.Kevin (35:19.893)Yeah.Seth Zeren (35:47.786)you know, historically like that, that was a transition. You'd go from town, right? Which is mostly detached, small multifamily buildings to herb to the city. The building starts to touch because the frontage is really valuable and you wouldn't just leave it for like, you know, five foot grass strips and whatever. Um, and so, you know, it still ends up being quite car focused because, you know, everything is sort of far apart and you know, you got to fill in the empty gaps.Kevin (36:13.781)Yeah. Yeah. I mean, a lot of that reminds me a little bit of what Jane Jacobs used to talk about in Death and Life of Great American Cities as sort of like the gray zones. Yeah, the in -between density.Seth Zeren (36:23.094)Yeah, the gray density. Yeah. And what I would say is what happened to my neighborhood to a certain extent, and I think this is true of a lot of American, you know, urban neighborhoods, you know, sort of pre -auto suburbanization is that what happened, there was so much, there was a lot of removal, even where there wasn't wholesale urban renewal, you know, mercantile buildings were taken down and replaced with a gas station, right, or a parking lot. And the church is, you know, brought down, you know, there's little holes in the fabric.And when I look at the neighborhood as like someone who thinks about cities and can see, can, you know, learns to look in that way, it's kind of looks like someone who's slightly sick, right? Their skin's a little pale, a little drawn, you know, there's a little yellow in their eyes. That's what it kind of feels like. And so it's about kind of filling it back up again. I think we've kind of, in a lot of cases, we kind of dipped down into the gray zone and we're trying to get back into it because once we get kind of out of that gray zone, adding density is good.Right, it brings more services, more people, which can support more businesses. And there's this positive feedback that strengthens the neighborhood and makes it better. But in the gray zone, it's like, well, is more people gonna make it worse? Like, what are we? It's a nice callback, because most people don't make it past parks in death and life. It's just too bad. I tell them all the good bits are at the end.Kevin (37:37.781)There's many good bits. But yeah, I think there's an interesting aspect of American cities in particular there where you have, and I think about this a lot, we wrestle with this so much in my part of town in Kansas City where there is a sort of urban density that actually works pretty well where everybody pretty much drives still, right? If you know what I mean, like it.Seth Zeren (38:05.526)Yep. Yep. Bye, Norris.Kevin (38:06.869)The parking is easy and it's just not that, it's not really urban, but it's not really suburban. And I think there was a generation of people who re -occupied a lot of urban places like that in the 70s and 80s in particular, who love it for that. They love the fact that they're like in the city, but it's like parking was easy. Now the problem is, yeah.Seth Zeren (38:17.91)Yeah.Seth Zeren (38:32.182)Yep, we have that here too, absolutely.Kevin (38:34.997)The problem is like historically that was a complete non -starter. Those neighborhoods had far more people, were far more urban. And by today's standards, it would have been incredibly difficult to have a car and drive it around everywhere and park it.Seth Zeren (38:49.258)Well, people forget that like you could have the same number of housing units and have fewer people because house hold size is so much smaller today. So the street is relatively empty, right? Compared to when grandma was living here, you know, 80 years ago, um, as far fewer people around.Kevin (38:53.365)Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.Kevin (39:03.381)Yeah. And now with the prevalence of like one car per adult everywhere, the challenge of trying to upgrade those neighborhoods to become more like their historical predecessors, it does create a lot of conflict because then all of a sudden we are wrestling with the, it's really the car issue in many respects. Yeah.Seth Zeren (39:15.798)Yeah.Seth Zeren (39:22.774)Yeah, you're moving from one equilibrium to another equilibrium. And that's always really painful because it's going to reduce quality along the trip, even if you end up in a better place on the other side. You know, one of the things I find really helpful or really valuable, and I admired your work about this, is the business improvement district. And I don't know, whatever we call that microform of government. And we're involved in helping create one on a main street near us that has suffered from a tremendous amount of urban renewal and...Kevin (39:32.501)Yeah. Yeah.Kevin (39:46.003)Mm -hmm.Seth Zeren (39:53.3)institutional concentration and we're trying to figure out how to improve that. And one of things that I've learned from doing that is that the city, even with a pretty strong planning department, Providence has a good planning department, lots of good people, plenty of staff. It's not low capacity, but they got a big city to run, right? And they can't know it super deeply everywhere all the time, right? And here, and I'm involved because we own a bunch of property nearby and I've been working in the area for years. And so I get to know all the other owners and I get to know thethe nonprofits and the businesses and residents and you know, but I'm working on like eight square blocks, if that right. And I know that really well. I can talk about this block versus this block and this crosswalk and that curb and this parking lot and that, that tenant and you know, at that micro level. And it just seems to me that that's gotta be the future of a lot of this governance stuff. Cause to get out of that bad equilibrium is going to require a bunch of really careful.tactical hands -on changes to infrastructure, to private development, public, you know, all those pieces. And when I look at the whole city, I'm like, there's not enough coordination, right? There's not enough attention. There's too many things going on, too many fires to fight. It's at that micro level that I could kind of organize enough people, run the small planning exercise, coordinate the private development, coordinate the public investment and keep on top of everybody. But it's only, you know, eight square blocks, right? In a big city.So how does that work?Kevin (41:21.525)Yeah. Yeah. Well, it's something we've wrestled with a lot and we obviously do a bunch of it here, but I'm a big believer in, you know, place management at that scale. And I think one of the issues that we've seen over and over again is, you know, my city is even much bigger. It's like 320 square miles geographically. It's insanely large. Half a million people in the city limits. So like relatively low density for that large of a city, but...the ability of staff to actually manage all that and know what's going on. It's impossible. It's literally impossible. Yeah.Seth Zeren (41:57.142)Well, I've been city staff and I remember how insane it was. I mean, you don't get out of the building because you're too busy answering emails. You know, this is like you fight with the engineers or whoever about an intersection is like, have you ever stood in the intersection for an hour? Because I have, right? Because I'm there all the time. But you can't run the city, you know, not getting out into the field and seeing the mucky bits, right? And that's like.Kevin (42:17.045)Yeah, there's just a there's a huge mismatch in how we manage cities and their ability to change and solve just solve problems, solve basic problems.Seth Zeren (42:25.43)Well, so one of my questions is, is that in part because like the way we teach kind of all the pieces of city building and management is kind of like, and it feels like they're individually busted and then the system is busted. So like public administration, civil engineering, architecture, planning, you know, development, all, you know, whatever that there's a whole package of different professional schools that you could go to that would teach you these different skills, but none of them talk to each other.And so when they're graduates, I remember being a planner and then talking to the civil engineer Newton being like, we're from different planets, man. Like the words I'm saying, you don't understand the words you're saying, I don't understand, like, and no one's in charge. So we're just kind of like, because every department, one of the things that happens in cities, right, is every department is co equal under the under a mayor or city manager or something. So like planning department can't tell DPW what to do. They're the same level, you know, and so we're just kind of butt heads.Kevin (43:01.493)HeheheheheSeth Zeren (43:23.67)But planning is in a particularly bad situation because they don't have any shovels or trucks or much free cash or anything else. They don't get to do much. Their only power is persuasion.Kevin (43:33.525)And it's the first jobs that are cut whenever there's a recession too. But yeah, I mean, the whole industry is very siloed. And this has kind of been the classic battle of the new urbanism from the beginning was really the push from our side was to create generalists, that people who could pull everything together. And our charrette process was designed to bring all those people together and problem solve at the same time.Seth Zeren (43:36.83)Yeah.Kevin (44:03.317)And that actually worked really well, and it does work really well when you're able to facilitate that. The challenge you have in a lot of city governments that I've seen is that they're just like you said, they're all vertically, you know, all differentiated vertically and it's all siloed. And there's not a ton of incentive for the different departments to understand each other and work together unless you have a particularly strong executive who forces that to happen.Seth Zeren (44:28.662)Yeah, that's really the game. It's like, does your executive get it and care and willing to spend the time on it? You've said something really interesting in the past on other versions of this podcast, which is that, I don't know if I'll get it exactly right, but we spend like 50 % of the time on design, 40 % on policy and 10 % on implementation. And we should be like a third, a third, a third. Here's the thing. I feel like the charrette process is really great, but then the charrette leaves. New urbanists don't have, as far as I can tell, much of an answer of how you actually run the city.There's no proposal on how to reorganize the departments of the city government. There's no proposal on charter reform for cities or, you know, there's a whole universe of, you what should the education for a city manager be? Right. We have, we have an idea about what planning should do differently, you know, and so there's bits and pieces, strong towns, urban three, talk a little bit about the finance side. We're just starting to think about it. When you open that door, you realize, oh my gosh, where are the new urbanist police chiefs? Where are the new urbanist fire chiefs? Right.the controllers, the tax assessors, there's this huge apparatus of public entities that are out there. And I guess part of the reason why the place management is so cool is that you get to actually just be a little micro government. And instead of having to silo off every little bit of things, you're a taxing entity, you can also go hire people to put out flowers, you can also write regulations, you're a whole thing. And so likewise, I feel like the CNU universe has not yet...Kevin (45:47.541)Yeah. Yeah.Seth Zeren (45:55.19)really contended with like the mucky bits of administering, managing the city.Kevin (46:00.245)Yeah, I think that's totally, I think it's totally fair. And, you know, I got a lot of that thinking from Liz Plater -Zyberg who, and so the way she broke it down was design, policy and management. That's the three legs of the stool. Most of the people who came to the new urbanism originally and were most passionate were designers. So they had a very heavy emphasis on design. There were also a lot of policy wonks. So you got that policy piece, but yeah, very few people from.the world of understanding how to actually manage cities. And we've had a lot of interaction and bring people to the table and conferences and all, but I still think very little understanding in that world of how things work.Seth Zeren (46:42.166)Well, and you go, I think, to the International Downtown Association, right? The IDA. How is it that the IDA and CNU are still, like, not connected at all? As far as I could tell, right? From the outside, it just, like, the stuff we're doing is so, so connected, right? And so this, I guess, is a plea to the CNU folks and a plea to the IDA folks, like, let's get together, guys. Because, like, CNU can bring a whole bunch of the design and policy ideas. But you're right, we need managers. And manager, Strong Town sometimes talks about howKevin (46:45.173)Mm -hmm. Yeah.Kevin (46:55.925)This is a good question.Seth Zeren (47:11.132)maintenance is not sexy, right? It's easier to get people to design a new road than just fix the damn road you got. But that's the problem, right? If nobody's interested and we have no way of making management or administration better, like you'll just keep doing new projects and then as soon as you leave, they'll just fall apart, right? Because no one's going to run them when you go.Kevin (47:32.981)Yeah, no doubt. And so hopefully we can make that happen. I would have talked with a few people about this that we need to find a way to link up. I mean, there's always been a linkage there, but it's just not nearly as tight and as strong as I think it could be. I'm amazed when I go to the IDA conference just how few new urbanist consultants even bother to attend, which is shocking to me. It's enormous. But yes, I think there's an in...Seth Zeren (47:53.558)Yeah, it seems like a huge missed opportunity on both sides.Kevin (48:02.965)One of the, I think, ill effects of the last 30 or 40 years of there's been a lot of education that's pushed really smart, ambitious young people into the policy world instead of emphasizing that how important really good management is. First of all, I would say design also. I mean, and problem solving with projects generally is incredibly important.My bias is doing projects is more important than policy, but I know there's a role for both. But management, God, if you don't have good ongoing management of a place, just like any business, if a business doesn't have good ongoing management, forget it, you're toast. And a city, if it doesn't have it, is gonna suffer tremendously. So, you one, go ahead, go ahead.Seth Zeren (48:54.038)Well, I was gonna say, I feel like in my head, I've been thinking about this for a long time. And when I went to school, I went into an environmental management program, quote unquote management, right? It was supposed to train professional people to manage environmental organizations, work in government, work at the forest service, work for nonprofits, working for profits, doing environmental stuff. Were there any classes on management stuff, right? Managing people, managing budgets.Communications, no, it was all science, which is great, fine, like I need to know some stuff about ecology or water management or whatever, but like, how are we a professional school? You know, we have to go out in the world and run organizations which have budgets and staff and HR and communications and negotiation. You know, you can go to the business school and learn some of that and a lot of people did, but you gotta ask yourself like, well, what are we doing here?Kevin (49:44.405)Yeah. Well, man, I had six years of architecture school and there wasn't one business course that was required the whole time.Seth Zeren (49:49.718)Yeah, I mean, I see that. And the planning people, you know, maybe it's gotten better. But when I was going through it, I took a negotiations class at the business school, which was the most useful class for being a planner. It was negotiations. Most planners, we don't need people with physical planning backgrounds. I mean, you need someone who can do some physical planning. Mostly you need some social workers because local government is like a family therapy. They have fights going back 20 years with their neighbor about whatever and who's yelling at who. And it's like, we need just some people to get people to talk to each other.It's not about technical analysis. No one ever voted for my zoning amendment because I had a great analysis. No, it's relationships. So, you know, I look at this as like, and I know there's been efforts around this at CNU, but I think we need to really get serious about building new educational institutions. I don't know that we can do it inside. I mean, we've tried it, you know, at Miami, we've tried it at Notre Dame, and there's been some successes, but it's just not enough, right? 30 years later, you know, there's just...it hasn't really changed anything in terms of what we're training. So we have another whole generation raised up in the old way of doing business and we're surprised when we get the same results.Kevin (50:55.829)Well, one of the things that even mystifies me, somebody who's gone to a lot of architecture schools to do student crits and everything else is like there's this, there's a whole group that have come through in the last, I would say 15 years that don't even know anything now about the early new urbanism because that was like so long ago and it's just not taught. So it's wild to me. It's like that has gone down the memory hole.Seth Zeren (51:14.038)Yeah.Seth Zeren (51:19.35)Yeah.Kevin (51:21.077)So I talk about that a lot with people that I know just to try to keep some of those things going and make sure people have a memory of what actually happened in a lot of those years.Seth Zeren (51:29.91)What I think is so striking is I don't think it's actually that much money that would be needed to build some of these institutions. So if anyone out there is listening and wants to write checks, fantastic. But you could get a lot done for not a lot of money building these new institutions. I really do think that. And the scale of impact on society could be really huge. Yeah.Kevin (51:51.893)Yeah. Seth, I want to switch gears and do one more topic before we run out of time. I want to hit on this piece that you wrote about Yenbys and New Urbanists in Strong Towns and sort of the differences or perceived differences, you know, amongst the groups. I wonder if you could sort of set the table and talk a little bit about what, where you were going with that one. It's a long piece for anybody who wants to read it, but it's, it's really good.Seth Zeren (51:55.862)Oh, sure.Seth Zeren (52:02.538)Yeah.Seth Zeren (52:14.326)Yeah, it's on my my sub stack build the next right thing which is I have small children So we watch a lot of Disney movies. That's do the next right thing, which is a song from frozen 2 But related to incrementalism, right? You don't have to know the final answer You just when you and you're confused you just do the next right thing, you know, you're gonna work your way through it solve the problem incrementally Pragmatically, it's very American way to work. It's good. That's build the next right thing andKevin (52:27.533)Know it well.Seth Zeren (52:45.27)It's a part because like getting to utopia is not like you're not going to take one jump to utopia. We got to like work in the world we're in. So this piece came out actually, ironically, I started writing this in the emergency room with my child in the middle of the night. Because when you have little children, sometimes they eat like stuff and you end up in the emergency room in the middle of the night. So I'm like, I'm like starting to jot down some notes and the notes were really stimulated by another guy, Steve Mouzon, who's been on your show, I think, who, you know, is active on Twitter and occasionally.regularly gets in fights with sort of the very online Yimby crowd. And then there was an exchange, you know, about a piece that Steve wrote and some other people responded. And, you know, a lot of people that I'm considered I like or I appreciate their work. I mean, I appreciate Steve's work. I assign his book on on on the original green. I appreciate Nolan Gray's work. I assign his his stuff. So but I was really struck by this continuing like fight.In this case, between the CNU and the Yenbis. And in my analysis, I mean, you can go read the piece, but I'll give you the really short version. It's basically that, and since I'm from California, I'm very sympathetic to the Yenbi argument, right? I feel it in my bones, right? I can never return to the soil I was raised on because of the failure that has gone before us. So in the Yenbi world, it's all about supply. We got to build a bunch of homes, right? And that's the overriding value and virtue and goal.right? You see it celebrate. We're going to build so many more homes. And the new urbanist orientation, which is really importantly different for a few reasons. First of all, it was started in the eighties and nineties when there wasn't a housing crisis. So the DNA is not built around a housing crisis was built around building crappy places, right? Go read, you know, uh, suburban nation, right? It's about building bad stuff. Read consular, you know, that's, that's the DNA. It's also mostly working in the South, you know, in the Midwest to a certain extent whereThere hasn't been a supply crunch, you know, because they're building stuff, right? It's building sprawl. We can build better sprawl, worse sprawl, but it's still just getting built. And so, you know, a lot of that is about quality. How do we build good places? And so what's so frustrating about, I think, to both sides about the EMBC and U debate is that often we agree. Often building density and building quality are the same. So we're on the same team, but sometimes they're not. And the worst...Seth Zeren (55:12.502)fight is with your ally who betrays you, right? Your enemies, yeah, f**k that guy, he's terrible, right? You know, that's easy, but my friend, I thought you were with me, but now we're not, ah. And so that's what keeps happening, right? The CNU folks are like, you know, that might be a little bit too much density, aren't you worried about the blank walls? Aren't you worried about X, Y, and Z? And then, and the, and the, the Yenbis are like, are you kidding, man? Like we're all homeless, like, unless we build this building, we don't have time for your cute little nonsense. You know, your ADU is just too slow, whatever.Kevin (55:15.477)YouSeth Zeren (55:41.878)And so that's, that's on sort of goals and the people are different, right? The CNU architects first developers planners, the Yimby movement really comes out of activists, uh, political advocates, regular people, software engineers who are not professional built environment people, uh, lawyers, right? It's a policy oriented movement, economists, right? That's the core. That's their intellectual DNA is.know, economists at George Mason, whereas the CNU, it's, it's an, a few architects at Miami. That's really different DNA, right? And I think the CNU has, for whatever reason, not really, it's done some behind the scenes politics, you know, policy change, right? There's been really important behind the scenes policy change, very not visible to normal people. It's never been interested in mass mobilization, you know, votes.persuading elected officials, it's not their jam. The Yenby movement is a political advocacy movement, right? So they're trying to like win votes and get lost. So the Yenby folks have gotten more bills passed that does a bunch of CNU ideas, right? The missing middle, ADUs, all the stuff that CNU came up with like 20, 30 years ago is being mandated by bills passed by Yenby. So they're like, CNU guys, we're doing the thing. Why are you yelling at us? Right? But the Yenbys don't always appreciate that the CNU has,rebuilt so much of the DNA of 20th century planning. So like, complete streets was like a CNU invention. People don't realize that anymore because it's now so mainstream. And so there's this sort of tension where people don't see the benefits the others have provided because they're kind of operating in different styles. So that's, I think, the sort of core tension. And then I added the strong towns because strong towns sometimes finds itself fighting with both of them.And often aligned, right? Often we're all the same team, right? I consider myself a Yimby. I run a Yimby organization. I also am a Strong Towns founding member and I've been at CNU a lot. But they're subtly different, right? The Strong Towns thing that puts them at odds with some of these groups is that Strong Towns core idea is that we need to reengage bottom -up feedback, right? That the system is too top -down, too...Seth Zeren (58:06.454)tightly wound, too fixed, too set. So we build these places that are built to a finished state. We can't ever change them. We have tables that are not responsive to content. So we're just locked up. We can't get anything done. And the Strong Town's idea is, well, we need the systems to be responsive, right? If housing prices go up, we should build. If they don't go up, we shouldn't build. We need to make the streets context sensitive. And so on the one hand, we're all for getting rid of parking requirements and upzoning stuff. So the inbys are like, great.But then sometimes we're like, well, that might be too much of zoning. Here's some reasons why. And the Yenbis are like, wait, I thought you were pro density. I thought you were pro development. We're like, yes, but right. Uh, the strong towns, people would worry that the Yenbis in 1950 would have been the suburban sprawl advocates, right? They would have said, we need the houses now. Damn the consequences. We're not going to worry about fiscal insolvency in 50 years. We're just going to build the houses now. You know, that's, so that's the strong towns. Sort tension with the Yenby movement is the top down, the sort of.And this is a result of your movement being led by political advocates and attorneys and economists, right? There's the concern about that kind of top -down policy orientation, these sort of single metrics, let's get it done. And then I think sometimes there's also debate with the CNU around things trying to be too precious. Ther

Nathan Norris and I have been involved in New Urbanism and the Congress for the New Urbanism for more than 25 years. And yet, our backgrounds and path to it couldn't be more different. Nathan came a military and a legal background, while I came from an architecture and design background. In fact, most New Urbanists were originally like me, and people like Nathan were the outliers.Nathan talks about how he followed his passions, sort of. Basically, things that angered him, led him to future work. Don't get the wrong idea - Nathan is not an angry guy. But he does describe how he found his way eventually to Placemakers, working in downtown Lafayette, Louisiana, and then back on his own with the City Building Partnership. We talk a lot about the importance of messaging and clear language, implementation of form-based codes, especially the SmartCode, and The Urban Guild among other topics.Find more content on The Messy City on Kevin's Substack page.Music notes: all songs by low standards, ca. 2010. Videos here. If you'd like a CD for low standards, message me and you can have one for only $5.Intro: “Why Be Friends”Outro: “Fairweather Friend” Get full access to The Messy City at kevinklinkenberg.substack.com/subscribe

This podcast speaks to a subject I’ve written about a lot lately — the demographic movement of Americans leaving the big cities for small cities and small towns. New York City alone has lost over 300,000 residents since the onset of the corona virus. John Boone and Hunter Renfro are the young principals at Orchestra Partners, a real estate investment company working to rehab old neighborhoods in Birmingham, Alabama, (pop. 212,000) and elsewhere in the south. Neither of them are trained architects or urban planners, nor are they card-carrying New Urbanists, but they’re working very much in that vein and have a lot to say about creating towns and neighborhoods that are worth living in and worth caring about. The KunstlerCast theme music is the beautiful Two Rivers Waltz written and performed by Larry Unger.

BE SURE TO SEE THE SHOWNOTES AND LISTEN TO THIS EPISODE HERE. Eve Picker: [00:00:00] Hi there, thanks so much for joining me today for the latest episode of Impact Real Estate Investing.   Eve: [00:00:06] My guest today is Donald Shoup. Dr. Shoup is a distinguished research professor with a focus on economics in the Department of Urban Planning at UCLA. He began studying parking as a key link between transportation and land use with important consequences for cities, the economy and the environment. His book, The High Cost of Free Parking, turned an otherwise academic topic into a significant policy issue. A second book, Parking in the City showed that parking reforms can improve urban metro areas, both economically and environmentally.   Eve: [00:00:47] Be sure to go to evepicker.com to find out more about Donald Shoup on the show notes page for this episode. And be sure to sign up for my newsletter so you can access information about impact real estate investing and get the latest news about the exciting projects on my crowdfunding platform, Small change.   Eve: [00:01:08] Hello, Donald. I'm really delighted that you've been able to join me today.   Donald Shoup: [00:01:13] Well, thanks for inviting me to Dallas.   Eve: [00:01:15] Yes. You've spent your career deeply immersed in parking and land economic issues, both of which are really hot button subjects right now. So, I'm wondering, first of all, how did you get interested in the economics of parking and why?   Donald: [00:01:33] Well, like everybody in parking, I think I backed in. Nobody wants to grow up to be in the parking business. They say, well, I was doing my PEC Dissertation in economics. I was working on land economics. So, I came to it from that angle looking at development and the value of land. And later on, I noticed that the market is the single biggest user of land of American citizens, the curb parking and the off-street parking. But it had almost no interest from any academic or even a lot of other professionals of the parking industry. But they were looking at it from the view of land economics. So, I had the field to myself for a long time. Donald: [00:02:29] Universities always strongly advocate equality and equity, but they are very rigidly hierarchical in their own operations. Everybody has different titles like Chancellor or the Vice Chancellor or the Deans and the Professors, and the Associate and Assistant Professors and lecturers and even the students, you know, the seniors and juniors and sophomores and freshmen. So, I think it's not just that we're hierarchal, but the things we study are also hierarchical, like international affairs are very important and national affairs are too. But state affairs are very, a big step down and local affairs are parochial. And then I think the lowest status topic, you know, even in local government would be parking. So, I was a bottom feeder for about 30 years, but there was a lot of food at the bar. And that's, that's how I got into parking. It was so easy to discover new things that nobody, well not many people, have been paying attention. But now there's almost a feeding frenzy. A lot of people are getting to study, at least among academics, or just studying parking and its effects. I think that's what you're interested in, not parking itself but how it affects the real estate of the city and the economy.   Eve: [00:03:58] Yes, and housing, right? So, you said it takes up a lot of land in American cities. How much land does parking take up on average?   Donald: [00:04:08] Well, nobody knows. It's highly regulated but the, no city, except San Francisco, has any census of parking that... You couldn't go to your city council or city planning department and say, how much parking is there in Dallas? They don't know. Although they regulate it very heavily on every site, there's no aggregate number that applies to all cities. But people who have looked at it in various ways think that, oh, maybe about 30 percent of the land is used for parking.   Eve: [00:04:48] Which is a lot of land. One of the statistics I read was that New York City, which has really high housing costs, actually is the eighth most affordable city out of 20 because the land is used really economically and there's less parking. The two certainly go hand in hand, don't they?   Donald: [00:05:10] Well, New York is a very special case, but most cities are like it. Several, the Department of Urban Planning's estimated there are about three billion on-the-street parking spaces in New York and nobody knows how many off-street parking spaces. But of those three million...   Eve: [00:05:29] That's a lot.   Donald: [00:05:29] …on-street spaces, only three percent have parking meters. So, 97 percent of all the car parking in Manhattan, in all of New York City, is free to the driver. So, of course, a terrific competition for it and it's a nightmare trying to find a parking space in Manhattan because it's free and lots of other people want it. So, there's an incredible amount of cruising around, hunting for parking. Seinfeld often talked about it. I think one time in an episode, George is coming to Jerry's apartment and Elaine is in the drivers, is in the passenger seat, and they can't find a parking space. And she said, well, let's park underground at the building. And he said, no, I never pay for parking. Paying for parking is like going to a prostitute. Why should I pay if, when I apply myself, maybe I can get it for free?   Donald: [00:06:31] So, I think that we've all been trying to get it for free for as long as we've had cars. And everybody wants to park free through to you and me, but we have twisted our cities is totally out of shape and real estate development totally out of shape with parking requirements that ensure that every new development has to have plenty of parking. So that won't overcrowd the free curb parking. So, I think that I've seen studies. I think, yes, the Department of Commerce did one study saying that: What is the biggest impediment to real estate development? Is it property taxes? Is it leverage issues? And almost everybody says it was required parking.   Eve: [00:07:17] Yeah. And have you seen a shift at all, over time in the last decade or two, the attitude towards parking?   Donald: [00:07:25] Oh, I think so. I've recommended three basic things. One is to charge the right price for curb parking, which is the lowest price that cities can charge and still have one or two open spaces vacant. So, nobody can say there's a shortage of parking because everywhere they go, they'll see one or two open spaces. But like real estate that's valuable, it won't be free. And then to make this politically popular, because drivers don't want to pay, is that the cities dedicate the meter revenue to pay added public services on the metered streets. You know, fix the sidewalks, plant street trees, clean the sidewalks, extra, well I shouldn't say police patrol right now, but, extra security. And some say to give free Wi-Fi to everybody on the block that has market-priced curb parking. So that people can see the benefits of charging for parking. Instead of having the money disappear into the general fund. So that's one policy to charge the right price and the second is to spend the revenue on added public services. And then the third one is to remove off-street parking requirements.   Donald: [00:08:39] And you've seen, all three of these happening in various cities. Houston just recently increased the share of the city that has no parking requirements. Houston is famous for having no zoning, but it has very elaborate parking requirements, just like any other city. Except for downtown, that they recently increased the area of Houston that doesn't have any parking requirements. And some cities have removed parking requirements entirely. San Francisco removed all its parking, off-street parking requirements, and Buffalo did, Hartford and London and Mexico City. It's spreading. I think that I and other peoples have preached the gospel that parking requirements do a lot of damage, that they raise the price of housing, they increase traffic congestion, they increase air pollution, they even contribute to global warming.   Donald: [00:09:43] So, I've never heard anybody, planners say: no, minimum parking requirements do not have these effects. The opponents of parking requirements are proving with study after study saying how it reduces the available land for development because so much of the space has to go for required parking. And it does increase housing prices at, and the prices of everything, because the cost of parking is hidden in the prices of everything else. Parking requirements make parking better, but they make everything else worse. And, as I said, I've never heard any urban planner say: no, parking requirements do not have these bad effects. I don't think you could find any professional in the planning industry or development industry who would say: no, parking requirements do not have these effects.   Donald: [00:10:39] So, I think some cities have begun to remove their off-street parking requirements. Others have begun charging, you know, what I call the right price or demand-based price, based on the demand for this scarce land. And they're spending it all on the, spending the revenue in the immediate district. So, I think all these three things are happening. So, I think the future of parking's here is just not evenly spread.   Eve: [00:11:08] Right. So, you know, Covid19, the pandemic, has probably accelerated a bit of this thinking. I've been watching news about cities like Milan in Italy, grabbing street back for pedestrians before they're fully occupied by cars again. And I'm wondering if you believe any of that will sort of help accelerate a move towards less parking, more purposeful use of valuable land.   Donald: [00:11:40] I'm sure it will. Covid19 has opened our eyes to a lot of things and one of them is a transportation. People are saying cities with very few cars, but a lot of pedestrians, and a lot of cyclists, and people eating at outdoor restaurants on the curb lanes, they could see that this is a lot better looking than having all the curbs completely jammed with cars and other cars hunting for, to find spaces being vacated. So, I think that it will lead to big reforms and it already is. Many cities have suspended the requirements of parking that the required parking lots have to be used for parking. They say, oh, you could use them for restaurants, outdoor restaurants with widely separated tables.   Donald: [00:12:34] But now in Dallas and every other city, they would say, if you want to have more outdoor city, you have to have extra parking for it. Most cities don't allow parking to be converted into outdoor restaurants. Everybody wants to eat outdoors. But you can't allow the required parking spaces to be used for a restaurant because that's against the parking requirements. So, I think that cities are experimenting. I have no idea if Dallas has done it, but a lot of cities have allowed restaurants to expand into their parking lots for outdoor dining. It will show people that there are better uses for land than storing empty cars. And, even if they're used for storing empty cars, they're still vacant most of the time.   Eve: [00:13:21] They are, they're vacant.   Donald: [00:13:22] If there's all those building where the parking spaces are empty during the evening, schools -- the average car as parked ninety five percent of the time so there have to be an awful lot of parking spaces wherever you go, because how can you drive somewhere, where there isn't plenty of parking? But if we think, we thought of parking as free parking and, even in downtowns like in Dallas, a lot of the people who drive to work get free parking. Is it paid for by the employer? You get free parking where you work?   Eve: [00:13:57] I don't park. I live downtown and my office is two floors below where I live. So my commute is very short, and I rarely, rarely drive.   Donald: [00:14:08] But in your apartment, are there a parking space or two available to you?   Eve: [00:14:13] Well, I have a tiny little building that has two spaces for the entire building. It's a building I built so it's a bit unusual, it's probably not a fair comparison.   Donald: [00:14:23] How did you build it without a lot of parking?   Eve: [00:14:26] Because it's downtown and in downtown Pittsburgh there's no parking requirement for residential.   Donald: [00:14:32] Oh, you're in Pittsburgh?   Eve: [00:14:33] Yes, I am in Pittsburgh.   Donald: [00:14:35] Oh, I thought you were in Dallas.   Eve: [00:14:37] No, I'm in Pittsburgh. So, downtown Pittsburgh for quite a while has had a zero parking requirement for downtown residential.   Donald: [00:14:45] Yes, yes.   Eve: [00:14:46] Not that the market didn't demand parking, right? That was when the market, the downtown market started here for residential. It was very hard to get going because people wanted to park their cars downtown. But I think in the last 10 years, that's really shifted. But I can't say that's extended to other neighborhoods. Somehow people feel entitled to have a car and a parking space.   Donald: [00:15:11] Pittsburgh does a lot of things right. The director of your parking authority is very famous in the industry, David Onorato, and I think they have some very good ideas. Say around Carnegie Mellon University, the university is the one who pioneered the policy of charging demand-based prices for curb parking. You know, they monitor the occupancy rate and they recommend the price that should be charged. So the best spaces have higher prices, than the distant spaces. I don't know if it was in Pittsburgh, whether it was just an idea or whether it happened, but, in some city, say, a grocery store will have a meters by the, spaces near the front door.   Eve: [00:16:00] Oh, interesting. That's interesting.   Donald: [00:16:01] You pay for, at a meter. The rest of the lot is free, and the meter money goes to pay, to charity. So, when you put your money into the meter you know that it isn't going to programs, but it's going to a local charity and they say what it's going to. So, I think that's another way to slowly bring prices into managing and parking.   Eve: [00:16:26] Yeah, that's really interesting. You know, you see a lot of strip malls where, you know, you have a sea of parking out the front or even in small main streets where there are parking requirements that really, kind of, force architecture that's overwhelmed by vehicles. And I worked at the planning department for a while, and I know what it takes to change a code, you know, a zoning code with the requirements, it's a mammoth and expensive exercise. And so, we have many smaller boroughs all over the country that have pretty old zoning codes now that require parking, and I really wonder how they're going to shift into, sort of, this new thinking.   Donald: [00:17:14] Well, it is very difficult to reform zoning for parking piecemeal that often on individual developments the developer will ask for a variance and say that "I don't need so much parking as you should require" and they to get a consultant show that this is true. There's so much study goes in to say, "If we if we reduce the parking requirement, well what should the new parking requirement be?" because it's all pulled out of thin air, there's no science at all. I mean students learn nothing about parking in their graduate studies because the professors have nothing to teach them. But they do learn that whenever they have a development project of their studios, the thing they have to worry about most is the parking requirement.   Donald: [00:18:02] So I recommend that cities should just remove off-street parking requirements. As I say, in Buffalo they had pages, like Pittsburgh does, pages of parking requirements, and it was replaced by one sentence and the zone goes: there's no work parking required for any use. That was so much easier than saying, well, let's have a study and say should they be cut by 20 percent or 30 percent or maybe the parking for a nail salon is too high, or something like that? That it's better to, to just say there are no parking requirements except for handicap spaces and specially what they should look like - the landscaping of them, and the water run-off and the location. The quality of the parking is what planners should regulate, not the quality. But in the U.S. we have a huge quantity of very low quality urban designed parking.   Eve: [00:19:05] Why do you think there's so much resistance to that? I think it's a brilliant idea because a real estate developer who has financial risk in building a building is going to think very hard about how much parking they need to market their building.   Donald: [00:19:19] Of course, and they know how much a parking space costs. The ramp parking space will easily cost fifty thousand dollars. And whether we talk about the need for parking, they're not talking about how much, whether people are willing to pay that much. I don't want to get into today's particular issue about Black Lives Matter. One of the things that I did through the years, I pointed out the fact that parking requirements strongly discriminated against low income people. Now we have measures of the net wealth of the population, you know, all your assets, minus all your liabilities. And of course, many young people have a negative net worth because they have student debts and no assets. Maybe a car or a cell phone. But I have looked at the median net wealth of Black families is about seventeen thousand dollars. Where for white families another hundred and sixty thousand, I think now. But cities are requiring for apartments for low income people and for Black people, two parking spaces per residence. That makes, the parking spaces could easily cost more than 17,000 dollars each. And then there has to be parking at all the restaurants, and all the theaters and all the grocery stores and every place else. So, planners are willy-nilly requiring wildly expensive parking spaces that low income people cannot afford.   Eve: [00:20:53] Yeah.   Donald: [00:20:54] Can you think that one parking space is worth more than the median net wealth of the Black population in this country? And yet it is. You're saying oh, well, you need 10 spaces per thousand square feet for a fast food restaurant. They have no knowledge of how much parking spaces cost or what it does to the looks of the building or who can eat there and things like that. So, I think that everybody probably looks at systemic racism through their own lens but I think in planning for parking there is a bias against low-income people in general and because Blacks are a lower income, it's a it's a bias against Black.   Eve: [00:21:33] Yeah, I think you're probably right. So, I've been working with an architect in Australia who has been developing workforce housing for service workers like schoolteachers and firemen and policemen. I mean, the cost of housing is so high there they've been driven further and further away, which means there is a bigger and bigger requirement for them to own a vehicle, right? Which is expensive. So, they actually built a building with 30 units and every person who was going to buy a unit signed a petition, because this building was right next to a train station and a bike, and a bikeway right into downtown. And every person signed the petition saying they weren't going to have a car. They were going to give up their car. And all they wanted was a bicycle. So, and the town planning, you know the town council there agreed that they could just build a small bike garage, which saved them a lot of money because they didn't have to build those 20,000 or 30,000....   Donald: [00:22:33] As you point out, that if we have parking requirements everywhere, it'd be hard for low-income people to get an apartment close to where they're going to work because the whole city is spread apart, because, to make room for the parking.   Eve: [00:22:50] That's right.   Donald: [00:22:51] And I think that if a low-income person has to buy a car to get a job, which is mostly the case, that they have to support the car. They have to pay insurance, for repairs and everything else. So, I think we have systematically favored the car through parking requirements. It's something that more cities are beginning to look at and maybe, I hope, some of your listeners will think hard and say, well, yes, it's a house of cars, these parking requirements. What you asked a planner say, well, how was this parking requirement set? They can never tell you. They can tell you what it is when you go to the planning desk and say, I want to build a nail, you know, open up a new nail salon, they'll tell you how many parking spaces you have to have. But they have no idea where that number came from.   Eve: [00:23:42] Interesting.   Donald: [00:23:43] Or how it was derived. How would you set the parking requirement for a nail salon? And you probably know much more about real estate than most urban planners.   Eve: [00:23:53] Yeah, it's really tough and so, now with this pandemic, you know, we kind of got to take another look at mass transit as well. You know, how are people going to get around when they're worried about catching a virus?   Donald: [00:24:07] Well exactly? I think so. I think that well, that's a slightly different policy that I'm recommending but as related to it, that, at least in L.A. and I suppose, in Pittsburgh, that we were amazed at how little traffic there is during Covid when people are staying at home. You could drive anywhere in Los Angeles.   Eve: [00:24:30] Yes. Here too.   Donald: [00:24:32] You never would have gone there before because you'd know that the traffic congestion was so terrible. Say, we have a city of Long Beach, which is south of Los Angeles and adjacent to it, has express buses to UCLA, it's about a 30 mile trip. And the schedule before Covid it was, it took about, I think, 90 minutes or something like that, at an average of 15 miles an hour on the freeway. And now, during Covid it was a twenty-seven-minute trip. And so, how are you going to maintain that? And one of the things I recommend is, what we already have is called hot lanes. Do you have these?   Eve: [00:25:19] Yeah, yeah. We actually have a dedicated busway which is fantastic.   Donald: [00:25:24] That's what we need more of.   Eve: [00:25:26] Yeah, I know. I can get from downtown to the airport faster on the bus for $2.50 than I can possibly drive, and it drops me right out the front door and it's really pretty fabulous.   Donald: [00:25:39] Well we have, we have these high occupancy vehicle tollways. There's HOV lanes that solo drivers can buy into it, if they pay a toll. But there's an incredible amount of fraud on them. Because we have to have a transponder if you use the lane and if you say that you have three people in your car, you don't pay any toll. I've seen the estimates that 30 percent of all the solo drivers in the tollways are saying that they're a three-person carpool. So, they pay nothing and that bogs down the HOV lanes because they don't perform the way they should. So what L.A. is just about to try is to say we're going to change it that everybody pays on the tollways except vehicles that have five or more passengers. So, if you're a two-person carpool or a three-person carpool or four-person carpool, you still have to pay. Of course, you get a discount on a per-rider basis - four people in the car, each person only pays 25 percent of the toll. It would be very easy to police the requirements that there be five people in the car. It's very hard for the authorities to put cameras to look and see, to check whether you actually have two or three people in the car. So, but if it's HOV5, as they're calling it, I think our freeways will begin to work really well and that buses will be able to go at high speed. If you could have an express bus from Long Beach to UCLA, and it might take half an hour instead of an hour and a half now.   Eve: [00:27:20] Isn't that great?   Donald: [00:27:21] So that it's more land economics. The streets, your very valuable land and we're giving it away free. And any, any time something's very valuable and you're giving it away free there'll be a lot of competition for it. That's why there's this terrible congestion. And that leads to air pollution, fuel waste, global warming. I think I've been invited to Pittsburgh maybe only once.   Eve: [00:27:47] Oh, we'll have to invite you again.   Donald: [00:27:51] I really enjoyed it. It's a wonderful town, of course, and I think a lot of people are moving there, from New York... I remember one time there was and interviewer from New York and I had a nice event with him and then later I wanted to get in touch with him. It turned out he had moved to Pittsburgh because it was so expensive in New York and he thought he got a much better lifestyle for the price in Pittsburgh.   Eve: [00:28:17] Yeah, it's nice city. It's small, but there's one of everything. But listen, I have another question for you, because if I were an economist ,I'd be figuring this out and you probably already have. So, with all that extra toll money and meter money, what would you do with it? And what could you do with it? How much extra money? I mean, how could that make other people's lives better, or people who walk or bike or?   Donald: [00:28:44] You mean how could removing parking requirements?   Eve: [00:28:46] No, no just increasing the cost of those valuable spaces and the freeways, like charging more in tolls and charging more at meters and..   Donald: [00:28:58] Well, I think the key to it is to tell people that if we install, you don't have to install meters because you could pay for parking now with your cell phones. And some people, some new cars have that app right in the dashboard of the car, that will be much more common in the future that your car knows what is the price of parking, if it's a new one, knows from the web how much parking costs, off-street and on-street, and it guides you to a good parking space. And so, I think it'll be cashless for paying for parking in the future and frictionless and when you find a parking space you just touch a button on your dashboard and you're paying for parking because the car knows where it is and what the price of parking is and then when you leave it automatically stops paying for parking. It'll be more like making a long-distance telephone call in the old days when you just paid for how long you've talked, where you called. So it will be like charging just the market price, the lowest price that you could, the city could charge for one or two open spaces. When they do that, if they spend the money in the metered area, the people will understand the meters are really helping because, say in a business center, because many people from outside the district who are paying for parking. It's not, it's not a tax on the merchants. It's like putting a cash register out at the curb and the neighborhood gets the revenue.   Donald: [00:30:38] I think there was one place in Pittsburgh they were thinking of running the meters in the evening and people said no, and the city offered to run an express bus to downtown for free if...with the revenue. And they, that persuaded people, well, maybe we should run the meters in the evening if it gives us a free shuttle bus to where we want to go. I think that people ought to think of parking like, on-street and off-street, like real estate and you ought to allocate it. Why do we have expensive housing and free parking? We've got our priorities the wrong way around. We've just been doing the wrong thing for 100 years. And I think that it's catching up with us now and we have different issues. We have global warming to worry about and clearly, requiring ample free parking everywhere is not going to slow global warming. And I think that when you remove all street parking requirements, it'll mean there'll be a lot of land available for development.   Donald: [00:31:43] The New Urbanists recommend liner builders, I don't know if you've seen them in Pittsburgh but it would, it's an important issue here in California where there will be an office building in the center of a giant parking lot, or a mall in the center of a giant parking lot, and if you built housing or even offices around the perimeter and turned some of the required parking into the housing, the land is already assembled, there's no assembly problem. There's no remediation needed, and you wouldn't have to build underground parking. So, I think that some of these giant parking lots, when there's liner buildings built around the parking lot, as you walk down the sidewalk, it will look like a real city. It's only about 25 feet deep but behind it is what's left of the parking lot. But people will have to start paying for parking both on-street out off-street for this to work. I think there is a lot of land right where we want to have it, ready for development, especially for work-adjacent housing. I think if you want housing / job balance, having the, building housing right on the parking lot of an office building is a great way to get it.   Eve: [00:33:04] And so, what's next for you? What are you working on? More parking or something different?   Donald: [00:33:12] Well, a couple of things. There is a thing I think I sent you. It was a new kind of zoning, zoning for land assembly. There was a problem in older areas, yes well, Pittsburgh is a good example, but L.A. has a lot of old development but there are a lot of very small parcels. Very small businesses, or small houses and now they're near a rail transit stop and it's very hard to assemble that land to build high density housing because of the hold-out problem. Everybody thinks that I'm going to be the key parcel that, if I'll hold out for a high price to get my share of the of the gain when they build a 10-storey building on this land. But if everybody thinks that way, everybody holds out and it's very hard to assemble land. Well, there was a new idea that was pioneered here in Southern California, that there was an area that had in Simi Valley that had very narrow lots but very deep because it had been an equestrian subdivision from the 1920s. So, each lot was about an acre or two but they were fairly narrower along the street.   Eve: [00:34:35] Interesting.   Donald: [00:34:36] They wanted to redevelop it but it was very hard to assemble the land because it had been with various families since the 1920s. And I think it was the mayor who thought of it, he said, well, let's say if you have more than five acres, we'll double the allowed density. And everybody began to think, well, you mean if I'm part of a land assembly the zoning will go up? And if I hold out it won't? And so, people began talking to each other, saying should we participate in a land assembly? And then people began to fear them being left out. That if some of the neighbors were beginning to agree to sell their land, some of which was vacant, there were no housing on it, some of which were vacant, if they sell their land and I can't be part of a new five-acre development I'll not be able to get this high density. And within a year after developers, maybe like you, real estate dealers had tried to organize land assembly that had never happened, within a year they'd assembled all but about three pieces of property. And within two years later, they have two hundred and seventy single-family houses at very high density over this county where there had been 13 before. So, I think this is, it's called graduated density zoning. The larger your parcel, the higher the density that's allowed so that people will begin to cooperate. Should we cooperate? And that means that the landowners will get a good deal for selling the land. They know they're selling for a higher-density developer. So, the people bidding for the land will have to offer them a price which is appropriate for land that will be rezoned as soon as the assembly happens. So that's, it's been spreading. Not as fast as I had hoped. But I think for older areas, for where the city wants land assembly, for more housing and certainly for more tax revenue, I think this graduated density zoning, as it's called, is a good idea. So that's one of the ways that's really not parking oriented. But also, it's easier to provide the required parking on a big piece of land, say, that any older buildings, like the one you're in, couldn't have been developed with a parking requirement because you can't get the parking and the building onto the same small site.   Eve: [00:37:18] Yes, you can't.   Donald: [00:37:20] So I think that this land assembly is, where the city wants it and where were the neighbors agree to it and they realize that, well, this is, what is the term, under-improved is that a term that's used in real estate? You know where there's just a shack on valuable land, but that shack is somebody's home. And if they have to move, they'll have to get something else unless they can sell their under-improved land for, to make way for a higher, higher density. And if the city provides, you know, requires some affordable housing and I guess they're giving away an increase in density they can then require affordable housing in some of the units. So, I think there are some good ideas out there.   Eve: [00:38:12] Yes, definitely. So, I especially like the no parking requirement idea. And I hope it takes hold really soon. And thank you very much for chatting with me.   Donald: [00:38:24] Ok, it was fun talking to you and I'm happy to be reminded of my happy visit to Carnegie Mellon.   Eve: [00:38:32] Ok. Thank you so much.   Donald: [00:38:34] You're welcome.   Eve: [00:38:35] Bye.   Eve: [00:38:36] That was Donald Shoup. He has a simple fix for the chaotic and varied parking requirements in U.S. cities. Remove the many, many pages of complicated parking regulations and replace them with one short sentence instead. No parking required. In the end, developers know best how much parking, if any, is needed. Parking, as Dr. Shoup points out, is an expensive use of our land. New York City, for example, has three million on-street parking spaces and 95 percent of them are free. If people paid for parking, those funds could be put towards making streets and sidewalks more attractive with more amenities for everyone. That sounds like a great plan to me.   Eve: [00:39:26] You can find out more about impact real estate investing and access the show notes for today's episode at my website evepicker.com. While you're there, sign up for my newsletter to find out more about how to make money in real estate while building better cities.   Eve: [00:39:44] Thank you so much for spending your time with me today. And thank you, Donald, for sharing your thoughts. We'll talk again soon but for now, this is Eve Picker signing off to go make some change.

Looking around the country, it might seem like Edward Glaeser was wrong to declare the “Triumph of the City” in his 2011 bestseller of the same name.COVID-19 revealed the fragility of urban areas like New York City, as millions of inhabitants who could afford to flee have done so – leaving behind struggling unemployed workers and cash-strapped governments. Brent Orrell of the American Enterprise Institute notes that we are seeing the acceleration of many existing trends – like remote working – which threaten to eviscerate the downtown commercial real estate market, taking city budgets down with them. Brent's recent Law & Liberty article, Pandemics, Elites, and the Future of the Cities, mirrors many of my thoughts on the future of cities. He will join me this Sunday to explore the themes of his article in more depth.Back in April, I was one of the first to speculate on the fate of skyscraper office buildings in my webinar on "the Future of Lending: Post-COVID." My verdict is that office space – like the financial services sector that has occupied it in places like NYC – has failed its final exam. To borrow Warren Buffett's analogy, it took the low tide of Coronavirus to reveal who was swimming naked.Yet in spite of the inevitable shift towards working-from-home, there are other reasons to be optimistic about cities in general. Glaeser's main point in The Triumph of Cities was that density enables the in-person meeting-of-minds that drives innovation and creativity. Urban sprawl is a direct result of people's growing desire to be close to the action while still having enough space to move around. Density is even more environmentally-friendly, since it eliminates the need to drive.But the same density that drives innovation can also lead to pandemics, rioting, and other forms of social unrest. While the upwardly-mobile have been able to escape to the exurbs or the suburbs, the same low-income people being infected with COVID have no options outside the crowded urban areas in which they reside. I will ask Brent, host of the Hardly Working podcast, how the hit to commercial real estate will affect service workers. We will also discuss the need for visionary leadership by urban elites, who can implement timely zoning reforms and lighten the regulatory load on struggling small businesses.Don't miss the conversation as we dissect the latest turmoil in cities across the country and how 2020 will be the year that makes or breaks cities.Perhaps now is the perfect moment for the New Urbanists, school choice advocates, and civil societarians to bring a free-market revolution to America's battered cities.Follow Brent on Twitter – @Orrell_b.

Thursday, June 27, 2019, 12 noon WPKN 89.5 FM www.wpkn.org Host: Duo Dickinson In the last few years, we have all heard the word “walkable” used to market homes in cities and towns. It has become a marketing buzzword, used to sell in-town living. But “walkable” used to be the norm in cities and towns. Cars changed that. The Connecticut Turnpike, I-95, opened in 1958, and within a decade its final extension through to Rhode Island and the building of I-91 completely changed Connecticut’s cities. The huge ribbons of concrete and steel cut through these towns, often wrecking neighborhoods. These roads acted as walls, cutting off neighborhoods and ending any connection to the water that created the cities in the first place. This highway invasion changed every city in America, and the Baby Boomers extended the Greatest Generation’s love of suburbia and car-based living in Connecticut by abandoning downtown living. Connecticut’s cities were becoming those places that were not worth arriving at. But in the last decade, there is a new beginning of a dramatic change in how cities are used. Connecticut’s cities and real estate developers are realizing that the appeal of living in a place that is truly “walkable” has real value – to both retiring Baby Boomers who do not want to mow lawns, and their offspring, the Millenials do not want to even own a car, let alone a home. What is the future of living, at HOME, in downtown America? Three thought leaders will be online for this hour: Robert Orr is an architect and a renowned town-planner with more than forty years national and international experience. With projects at Seaside, and the New Hartford Library, Camp Anne and commercial, institutional and community projects, as well as custom residential homes, Orr’s role as urban designer has a depth of perspective few others can offer. Robert Orr has been honored with many design awards and featured in hundreds of publications at home and abroad. John Massengale has won awards for architecture, urbanism, architectural history, and historic preservation, from organizations and publications ranging from Progressive Architecture and Metropolitan Home, to the National Book Award Foundation (with the first architectural history book to win a National Book Award), to several chapters of the American Institute of Architects, and the Walton Family Foundation. He has served on the Boards of the Congress for the New Urbanism (CNU), the Institute for Classical Art & Architecture (ICAA), and Federated Conservationists of Westchester County (FCWC), and was the founding Chair of both CNU NYC and CNU New York (the state chapter). Massengale has taught at the ICAA, the University of Notre Dame, and the University of Miami and is a licensed architect in New York State. Steve Mouzon opened his own architecture firm in 1991 and produces a number of town-building tools and services. Mouzon Design’s Premium Tools Collection is a subscription service to robust new place-making tools that heretofore were unaffordable when commissioned by a single development. A Living Tradition is a framework for a new type of pattern book that is principle-based instead of taste-based, and therefore contributes to the creation of new living traditions. Steve is also a principal of the New Urban Guild in Miami. The New Urban Guild is a group of architects, designers, and other New Urbanists dedicated to the study and the design of true traditional buildings and places native to and inspired by the regions in which they are built.

This is our fourth dispatch from the Congress for the New Urbanism (CNU), which took place in Savannah, Georgia in May. Chuck Marohn attended CNU and hosted a series of in-depth podcast conversations about some of the most pressing topics for cities today, with leaders, thinkers, and activists in a whole range of fields. Now we're bringing those podcasts to your ears throughout the summer. In this episode, June Williamson (associate professor of architecture at the City College of New York), Dan Reed (urban planner and writer) and Galina Tachieva (managing partner at DPZ), discuss the clashes and overlaps between sprawl retrofit and suburban poverty. Questions discussed in this podcast include:   What's the latest research on sprawl retrofit? What are some successful examples of sprawl retrofit? Can retrofit happen using a basic, repeatable template, or do local leaders need to be equipped to decide what's best for their community? In smaller communities without deep pockets, where is the capital going to come from to make these sorts of changes? Where should we invest the money and time to do retrofit, and where does it make more sense to "re-green," i.e. return failing suburban developments back to nature? How do we, culturally, make these decisions when they impact real towns and real (often low-income) people? How do communities handle the increasing pressure on their suburban areas to maintain a certain lifestyle while many of the residents who live in these places simply can't afford the immense costs of suburban infrastructure? In communities dominated by failing suburban developments and utterly lacking investment, is there any strategy to save them? Many lower income Americans who reach a level of financial comfort want to make their homes in the suburbs. Should people (like New Urbanists) who feel they see the writing on the wall in terms of the declining future of suburbs tell these folks to give up on their dream of owning a home in the suburbs? What mental models and assumptions are enabling and underlying the decisions that have gone into the suburban development pattern? What will America look like 20 years from now if suburban retrofit succeeds? What percent of America can actually be retrofitted?

New Urbanism Special. JHK chats with Andres Duany, a founding board member of the Congress for the New Urbanism about a new book (with a chapter by JHK) taking on the frauds and fakers at the Harvard Graduate School of Design and their so-called Landscape Urbanism program -- since they never tire of attacking the New Urbanists. Also on board is Emily Talen, co-editor of the new book and professor of Geography, Urban Design, and Sustainability at Arizona State University.     The new KunstlerCast music is called “Adam and Ali’s Waltz” from the new recording Waiting to Fly by Mike and Ali Vass.

JHK and Duncan speak to a group of NextGen New Urbanists during the Congress for the New Urbanism held in West Palm Beach, Fla. this May 9-12. NextGen New Urbanists are young professionals participating in the New Urbanist movement. Jim asks the group to tell him what they're up to and what's next for New Urbanism. After a quick history of the NextGen movement, topics include: Resettle America, the Braddock PA Initiative, Tactical New Urbanism, Growing Culture and more.

James Howard Kunstler recently returned from the 18th Annual Congress for the New Urbanism. Agrarian urbanism was a hot topic among many New Urbanists at the Congress and in this episode Kunstler takes the time to explore the topic of food production in cities. Rising energy prices and poor growing weather may lead to global food shortages, but JHK believes that the idea of feeding the U.S. population with rooftop gardens and skyscraper terrariums is absurd. Gardening and even raising certain animals in the city was a normal part of urban life before World War II and we may see a return of some of those practices. But Kunstler believes that it is important to cut through some of the fantasies to figure out what's really possible. We must also be careful not to confuse the urban with the rural.

James Howard Kunstler tells the story of how he came to learn about peak oil while writing about suburban sprawl. Topics include The Yom Kippur War, The Hubbert's Curve, the New Urbanists and the strong relationship between suburban sprawl and diminishing supplies of cheap fossil fuel. Kunstler explains the chronology and relationship between all four of his nonfiction books.