Zak Yudhishthu

I can't stop thinking about this. We're pursuing zero fire risk in multifam, while tolerating much more in single-fam. People respond by building and living in single-fam, where they're exposed to not only one of the highest fire death risks in the developed world, but also TONS more car crash risk

I always called it “the Brooklyn of Saint Paul”

In Minneapolis’s downtown, development must be 10 stories tall with a 4.0 FAR, while different transit-adjacent areas have minimum heights ranging from 2 to 10 stories. This policy has come into play a couple of times in the past few years. For example, in 2023, a developer wanted to build a seven-story, 135-unit building next to Minneapolis’s Prospect Park Green Line stop. However, the lot was zoned for a 10-story height minimum and city staff refused to grant a variance for a seven-story building. The development was rejected, and no new construction has occurred on the lot.

IMO @zyudhishthu.bsky.social nails it on mandatory minimum densities: you CAN do them right, but the benefits are so minimal & the risks so inevitable that they're not worth the trouble pencillingout.substack.com/p/can-we-boo...

Imagine waking up from a coma, out cold since 2016, to learn that “the governor of California is giving a non-response about statewide upzoning on a Fortnite stream”

Well I absolutely agree with that!

It sucks that SFHs can outbid a three flat, but the deck is stacked. And honestly, those SFH purchasers should be forced to compete not just with 3-flats but with far denser development (ie should upzone much more)

I was gonna post about that but I think that instance is the best counterexample to my argument! That’s really crazy and I get why it angers people. It’s also an extreme case in a pretty particular neighborhood.

But ultimately I think that zoning broadly for more density is a lot more important

At the end of the day, housing markets are complex things, and I’m hesitant about the role of prescriptive regulatory policy in successfully tackling our problems. Reasonable urbanists could disagree, but beware the pitfalls of using zoning to restrict less-dense development.

Even w/o harming development, someone is worse off with these policies. Eg. deconversions in Chicago’s North side seem to supporting strong growth in the number of families.

Affected households are likely richer, so the tradeoff might be worth it. But the tradeoff does exist.

But I’m not sure how easy it is to pull off this strategy without accidentally hurting development. In Minneapolis, a 10-story height minimum led to no development at all after rejecting 7 stories. Store owners rebuilding after 2020 are struggling to meet 2-story minimums!

What does this strategy accomplish? In some places, people with a lot of willingness (and ability) to pay for certain housing, like a SFH, can outbid a denser development that is otherwise feasible. Zoning for minimum density can box these people out, getting to more density.

Or see Portland’s 2020 zoning reforms: the city implemented a FAR limit where none had been before, seeking to zone out “McMansions”. In exchange, the FAR gets larger with more units, so 4plexes can be larger than a SFH.

The explicit goal is to (dis)favor certain housing types

As another example of this policy, Minneapolis’ 2040 Plan also implemented minimum FAR and buildings heights in various districts of the city, explicitly zoning out development that they don’t thing is dense enough.

In recent years, Chicago and other cities have tried to use zoning to discourage lower-density development, favoring the types of housing urbanists often support. I get where the idea comes from, but we need to be careful about unintended consequences.
pencillingout.substack.com/p/can-we-boo...

Last fall, a developer proposed to destroy a Logan Square church for three single-family homes. New minimum density requirements in Chicago’s NW Side made this illegal, and 16 units will be built instead.

Are these types of zoning laws good? I’m not so sure, and I blogged about why.

Also interesting: noise externalities mean that electric vehicles are also socially beneficial because they're quieter.

Based on estimates of how much quieter EVs are from the engineering literature, they estimate 100% EV adoption would cut noise externalities by about 3/4

The benefit of noise barriers is mostly within 100 meters of the road and fades out pretty quickly — in other words, there are very concentrated costs for those who live right by traffic

You probably won't be surprised to see that there's a lot of inequality in exposure to traffic noise: people dealing with high traffic noise are poorer, less educated, and more likely to be black.
www.nber.org/papers/w34298

This is a nice working paper showing that traffic noise creates a pretty large externality. Near major roads, people are willing to pay ~6-10% more for homes after a sound barrier is built.

They estimate that traffic noise has an aggregate externality of $110 billion!

We used to make some incredibly great lobbies for our office buildings

Logan Square is one of the coolest neighborhoods in the world The Northwest Side community area has it all.

Indeed it was!

This reminds me of how they slice up college rankings where you can be like “#6 school in student faculty community service opportunities” and everyone gets something to advertise

www.timeout.com/chicago/news...

Didn’t Logan square win this last year?

Passing through the area one might call the “Rust Belt of Chicago’s North side”

imagining jack kerouac drinking himself to death at a sports bar in a supermarket

You don't think Chicago has a claim here? More expensive than Baltimore of course, but it's incredibly huge and vibrant.

Freshly re-painted helical sunburst in yellow orange and blue spanning an intersection in St Paul's Midway neighborhood

St Paul is so back

Where at 🙂

Perfect sunrises on Fullerton, and Armitage, today

Alrighty I am at the "Edgewater Residents for Responsible (no) Development" meeting.

Lively crowd tonight, the parking lot is full. I saw someone squarely and aggressively hit the curb on their way into the lot outside.

Fortunately I took the train. And the folks im here with biked.

Plus, a theory that US lawyers might be especially costly for infrastructure development, because there is more politics in the judiciary and this increases uncertainty