Samuel

Legalize it

Legalize it! #lfk

Palestine benefit show at the Bottleneck, Sunday Oct. 26th. $10. Doors @ 7, show at 8pm. All proceeds going to the Sameer Project. Pictures a cool cat.

#lfk

Advocates with a bunch of student-loan debt 😩

You probably cannot afford a car, and you almost certainly can't afford not to have one. This is the definition of a policy failure.

Kansas City Built a City We Can't Afford - And How We Might Fix It For decades, The City of Kansas City, MO has been celebrated as one of America’s most affordable and livable cities. This has lead to a prosperous period with lots of positive momentum, but buried in ...

Important article from Beck Johnson on Kansas City's fundamental economic quagmire: www.linkedin.com/pulse/kansas...

Highlights For marginalised street users mode separation is the key to human-scale movement. Streets conducive to walking and cycling have functional, safe and accessible design. Professionals must approach street design, regulation and user behaviour holistically. Combinations of influencing factors persuade people to either use or avoid a street. There are no easy fixes to the public realm that will work for all non-drivers.

"The single most important behaviour, design or regulation for creating streets conducive to walking and cycling, was physical separation between the modes"

We've got a new study out, learning from a broad mixture of street users, planners and designers

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

"Over half of the e-cargo bike mileage ridden during trials substituted for car use."

doi.org/10.1016/j.jc...

Good thread explaining the census data on housing vacancy.

These Residents Built a $10,000 Bike Lane in Atlanta Dozens of community members came together to build the pop-up bike lane through the city's tactical urbanism initiative.

Tactical urbanism award in Atlanta allows neighbors to plan a bike lane and after a year, and fundraising 10k, to build that sucker in 2 days

The demand for safe movement in cities is high. We're only limited by our imaginations and political will

share.google/AaScU0QA5vvr...

Our Streets Look Like War Zones — But What if They Were 'Sites of Peacebuilding' Instead? — Streetsblog USA A peace and conflict studies scholar weighs in on what car culture has in common with global conflicts — and why we need to confront violence on our roads if we want to end violence around the globe.

Few days late but wanted to be sure to shout out this great convo I had with Ashton Rohmer, who points out that all the deaths and damage that flows from car culture isn't dissimilar from the horrors of war, and what it would mean to apply "peace building" strategies to urbanism.

Probably a good call!

You been on FB recently?

"it's just more deregulation"

the regulations:

- single family zoning
- single use zoning
- lot size minimums
- parking mandates
- height limits
- sqft minimums
- floor area ratio
- setback mandates
- lot coverage maximums
- occupancy limits
- high permit/development fees
- manufactured home bans

+ the Amish

Dang! Good to know! Just picked up a huge pawpaw today!

I’ve come to the conclusion that Historic Resources Codes seek primarily to reproduce R1 zoning in a much, much more intractable form.

Climate change is a local issue.

And people love CCs!

From Stuck: "If we require multiple dwellings to be fireproof, and thus increase the cost of construction; if we require stairs to be fireproofed, even when there are only three families; if we require fire-escapes and a host of other things," then, he continued, each of the rules could stand up in court, "and at the same time we have made it difficult to build apartment homes."

From Stuck: But although some champions of tenement reform were earnest in their efforts, no one who had paid the slightest attention to the movement could have any doubt as to the actual aims of many reformers. The influx of immigrants to New York City was the problem; eliminating affordable housing was the solution.

From Stuck: Veiller, instead, did everything in his power to make housing more expensive. Immigrants continued to pour into the city in the years immediately after the passage of the Tenement Act, but newly constructed tenements became increasingly unaffordable. The cost of making the improvements to old-law tenements mandated by the law, and increasing competition for the remaining affordable units, combined to drive up prices, setting off rent strikes in 1904 and 1907. "The fact is that the new-law tenements ... are beyond the reach of unskilled wage earners," one reformer complained in 1919.

Many of our land use / building codes are rooted in exclusion + prejudice, even if they are facially anodyne and widely accepted as common sense today

Case in point: early 1900 fire safety reforms were primarily designed to ⬆️ the cost of tenements / MF apts (old and new) to reduce immigration

What do you miss about it? The downtown location, or just in general?

Similar to parking benefit districts!

Major win for Lawrence, Kansas. Communities across the country are dealing with these issues right now (or failing to deal with them, as almost happened here) #lfk

This is a good read on network design

I think abt this thread as Lawrence, Kansas considers a vacant property ordinance.

Don’t slip!

This is despite the fact that households living in multi-family housing tend to own fewer cars than single-family households.

In a not too distant past in Lawrence, Kansas, we required one car parking spot per bedroom—but only for multi-family housing. Single-family housing did not have this requirement. #parkingreform

From Stuck! by @yappelbaum.bsky.social, some great history on U.S. building codes and Lawrence Veiller's work on tenement laws:

Powerpoint slides from a presentation entitled “Unleashing the Silent Majority to Beat Bikelash”, which feature photographs of urban transformation from cities around the world.

The global phenomenon of “bikelash” has become one of the biggest barriers to implementing interventions that make our streets more liveable, accessible and sustainable. So how do we best manage it as advocates for change? Here are eight strategies we recently presented at the Velo-city Conference.🧵