Great Urbanist (and related) Writers

My recommendations for other substack writers you should subscribe to

Oct 10, 2023

Hi readers old and new: In this article, I’m revisiting the topic of converting offices into co-living since it’s gaining attention with a new report from the NYC think tank, 5BORO Institute. Later this week I’ll have another article on cities that are taking nature seriously (behind the paywall…

2 years ago · 9 likes · 4 comments · Diana Lind

Andrea Learned On Climate Influence

Walking The Talk Is How We Do Climate Leadership

Post Climate Week and heading into COP28, I keep reading debriefs and media analyses about how we are not yet seeing leaders showing leadership or truly acting. Meanwhile, we’ve got nothing but steady reports on increasing emissions and how far we are from meeting Paris Agreement goals. Argh…

2 years ago · Andrea Learned

Apply Liberally

The US should be investing in humanitarian assets

In defending the principle of free trade, American liberal polemicist Henry George laid out a functional definition of the optimistic (some might say utopian) worldview that liberals subscribe to: “The interests of men are harmonious, not antagonistic; that prosperity is the daughter of good will and peace; and that wa…

2 years ago · 2 likes · Matthew Downhour

Apricitas Economics

America's Economy Was Bigger Than We Thought

Thanks for reading! If you haven’t subscribed, please click the button below: By subscribing you’ll join over 35,000 people who read Apricitas weekly! The US economy was larger than we thought, and its recovery from the pandemic was stronger than previously believed. Those are the broad conclusions of the comprehensive and annual revisions to America’s national accounts data published last week—they showed US GDP was 1.7% higher than previously reported and that cumulative real growth since the start of 2019 was 6.3% instead of 5.6…

2 years ago · 33 likes · 5 comments · Joseph Politano

Arpitrage

Rethinking Public Procurement

When you’re reading about government projects, the final cost estimates always seem to have a few more zeros than you anticipate. For instance, a recent report about failures in payroll HR software for California schools includes the following details…

2 years ago · 20 likes · Arpit Gupta

Asphalt Jungle

Food & Beverage

Going to a restaurant is one of my keenest pleasures. Meeting someplace with old and new friends, ordering wine, eating food, surrounded by strangers, I think is the core of what it means to live a civilized life. Adam Gopnik, The New Yorker I’ve not found a better tool for juicing surrounding property values than a good restaurant. And it’s not the fanc…

2 years ago · 5 likes · Eric Weatherholtz

Best urbanism tweets

Study suggests bike lanes do not cause gentrification

Hello all - my favorite tweets on urbanism from the past couple days below…

4 years ago · Coby Joseph

Better Cities

How Transit Agencies can Bounce Back from Covid

Across the country, transit ridership is still down significantly from pre-covid numbers. After three years, it’s safe to say that commuting patterns have changed permanently, and transit agencies are still working on adjusting. As can be seen in the chart, some transit agencies have done better than others at getting ridership back to pre-pandemic lev…

2 years ago · 23 likes · 7 comments · Sam Deutsch

Building Knowledge

1 Minute Plan Doctor: 1 Bed to 2 Bed

Earlier this week, I posted a video showing how I was able to turn a one bed/one bath into a 2 bed/2 bath unit with a few strokes of the pen. When a project is in the design phases [preferably not to…

2 years ago · 6 likes · Marilyn Moedinger

California Thoughts

Creating a Home Building Machine

Background There has been recent movement to reduce the most extreme forms of exclusionary zoning in costly rental markets. California, Oregon, and other states and municipalities have rolled back “single-family” zoning, or development rules that restrict parcels to only one unit. California, for example, passed a series of…

3 years ago · 7 likes · 7 comments · S.H.

Cape Connected

People Love Downtown Cape, so Why Doesn't More of Cape Look Like Downtown?

I have built my entire life around Cape Girardeau. My friends and family are here, and I attribute some of my strongest relationships to the welcoming design of Downtown Cape. If this area wasn’t as friendly to walkers, I doubt I would have ever met some of the people I call my best friends…

2 years ago · 2 likes · Zelda Mazur

Chris Arnade Walks the World

Somethings I like about Germany

(My three prior posts on Germany: Walking Ruhr Valley, Walking Rhine Valley, Walking Gorlitz) In my two-plus weeks in Germany I walked over fifteen miles per day, all while lugging around a twenty-pound backpack. Usually that means I need to worry about losing weight, like I did when…

2 years ago · 106 likes · 38 comments · Chris Arnade

Cognitive Urbanism

Car-free urbanism

Over the last decade, I have been working with Ann Sussman and a number of other collaborators to understand how we respond to places at a subliminal level. My book with Ann, Cognitive Architecture: Designing How we Respond to the Built Environment…

2 years ago · 4 likes · Justin Hollander

Construction Physics

How Fast Can a City Grow?

In the last post, we noted Los Angeles was the fastest-growing city in the US at the end of the 19th century, growing nearly 10% yearly between 1880 and 1930. This made me wonder what the landscape of city growth rates looks like. How fast were other US cities growing at the same time, or before and after that? How does a 10% annual growth rate compare t…

2 years ago · 44 likes · 13 comments · Brian Potter

Debunking Gentrification

Left-NIMBYs are Categorically Worse than Suburban NIMBYs

I became interested in urbanism 13 years ago. At the time, affordability requirements were purely hypothetical, and any new building that brought people into the city from suburbia was considered progress. Our city centers were neglected and people were excited to see historic buildings renovated, sidewalks repaired, and neighborhoods spring back to lif…

2 years ago · Drew

The Deleted Scenes

Urbanism Without Cities?

I wrote, earlier this year, about my appreciation of the D.C. suburbs and the sense of place I get from them, or have cultivated living in them: I sometimes write that I’m thankful or grateful to have discovered urbanism, broadly defined. I know others who have this same feeling. What I mean by that is that I think a lot of really deeply human ways of do…

2 years ago · 14 likes · 9 comments · Addison Del Mastro

density dad

What Is Transit Equity?

Transportation Justice 101 Often I consider the many steps it takes me to arrive at work on time via public transit in comparison to those in more affluent parts of town. A bus comes every hour to my complex here in Southside (Richmond, Virginia…

2 years ago · 3 likes · Barry Greene Jr.

Exasperated Infrastructures

Roadways for People: Rethinking Transportation Planning and Engineering

“City planners must also recognize that the process is the project.” — Janette Sadik-Khan From the foreword to Lynn Peterson’s book—Roadways for People: Rethinking Transportation Planning and Engineering—this quote is an essential postmodern approach to transportation planning in the 21st century. It deconstructs the idea that our job as planners and urb…

2 years ago · 5 likes · sam sklar

Hate The Game The Newsletter

Capitalism Rules Everything Around Me

If you've been on TikTok or around Gen-Z lately, you might have heard that capitalism is the cause of everything wrong in the world. It's why you can't get a date. It's why you can't make meaningful friendships. And, of course, it's why you can't afford nice things…

2 years ago · 17 likes · 7 comments · Daryl Fairweather, PhD

Hope in Cities

Introducing The City Builders Collective

For those who don’t know my story, I stumbled into urbanism through an elective course in college about the American city. Though I’d just recently switched my major to political science, I spent so many credit hours on urban geography electives that I wound up an accidental geography major, and an accidental urbanist with that…

2 years ago · 6 likes · 2 comments · Michael Natelli

The Messy City

What is a "Messy" City?

Years ago, I remember many people using the term "gritty" as a way to describe places. As in, "I like gritty cities." Or, "that place is nice, but it doesn't have enough grit for me." Often it was used by urban-lovers that were reacting to the very sanitized nature of a lot of modern American suburbia. I used it; I identified with it, even in my very ca…

7 years ago · 2 likes · 1 comment · Kevin

Model Citizen

A Case Study in NIMBY Entitlement

4 years ago · 23 likes · 4 comments · Will Wilkinson

One Useful Thing

Everyone is above average

Congratulations - you are now above average! It may sound like an old, bad statistics joke, but I mean it quite literally. We now have very strong evidence that AI elevates the skills of the lowest performers across a wide range of fields to, or even far above, what was previously average performance…

2 years ago · 262 likes · 29 comments · Ethan Mollick

Reece Martin

Please... space the bus stops out.

I decided to take a bus to a meeting today, and it was bad. I had to go about one and a half kilometres, and I figured that given I really didn’t want to walk or bike (weather), and given I was on a frequent bus route, I might as well just catch the bus. But the experience really was a throwback — almost all the way to me…

2 years ago · 12 likes · 7 comments · Reece

Reinventing Real Estate

Putting People First: Why Resident Experience is Now the Most Important Part of Real Estate Development

User experience (UX) design is a well established field. A UX designer’s job is to make a product or service usable, enjoyable, and accessible. Most of us are familiar with this idea from the apps and websites we use every day. We’ve all been to websites that are…

2 years ago · 11 likes · 11 comments · Joel Anderson

Sidewalk Chorus

Why housing is so expensive in New York

A couple of weeks ago some good friends of mine on the Upper West Side got news that their rent is going up by 15%. They’re thinking about leaving Manhattan to move somewhere cheaper. This month another friend is moving from Chelsea to Jersey City after she found a much better deal there. Other friends have told me about brokers asking for bribes, fierc…

2 years ago · 2 likes · Sebastian Hallum Clarke

Some Unpleasant Arithmetic

The Monocrisis

Historian Adam Tooze has popularized the concept of the “polycrisis”, a set of interrelated and interconnected crises (climate, migration, economic, political) that make each other worse and threaten the stability of the world and its economic and political systems. I’m not gonna talk about the idea so go read…

2 years ago · 26 likes · 5 comments · Maia Mindel

Stay-At-Home Macro (SAHM)

Why can't we shake the gloom? It's more than inflation or higher prices.

Today’s post expands on my Bloomberg opinion piece about the unusually large degree of pessimism about the economy. After exploring several possibilities like inflation, partisanship, and negative news bias, I argue it’s Covid and its aftermath. Given the feedback to my piece, I will come back to my arguments about why inflation can…

2 years ago · 49 likes · 64 comments · Claudia Sahm

StrongHaven

The Magic Bus

TGI Bike Bus I don’t know a lot of parents who would name school drop-off and pickup as the high point of their week. But for me, every Friday, it is! That’s because I get to roll to school with a crew of riders that’s now up to fifty students and growing. With accompanying adults, we ride over sixty people deep…

2 years ago · 6 likes · Will Gardner

Trader Jane's Emporium of Fine Beverages

Back to Basics

So…I was having a nice little exchange on Twitter that reminded me…I haven’t written anything about a true classic in this space, the Mai Tai. Now, I know I try to use it to explore either my own or lesser known corners of the world of tropical beverages, but it would not really be a tiki Substack if I never brought this up once, would it…

3 years ago · 4 likes · 1 comment · Jane Natoli

Urbanism Speakeasy with Andy Boenau

A walkable neighborhood is elder care

From employment opportunities to healthcare access, we hear about stories of ageism. What about transportation systems? Modern American infrastructure confines older adults to automobiles, curtailing their independence and risking their safety. ageism (noun…

2 years ago · 28 likes · 7 comments · Andy Boenau

Walking Across Japan

Across The Middle of Japan

So the Japan Standard Time Walk is over. Spread over a few weekends and holidays for the last six months, I have walked all the way across the middle of Japan. Walking is a pleasure in itself, but one thing I wanted to do on this walk was to compare urban and rural Japan. So what did I learn about the difference between the urban coastal sprawl of the K…

2 years ago · 7 likes · 2 comments · Julian Smith

The Walkist

Bones, Bedrooms, and a Bidding War: Obstacles (Part 1)

Hello, everyone, and a big welcome to the 361 new subscribers that have joined the community since The Walkist’s last article was published. I took the last month off, and I’m excited to be back with you. We’re now scratching at the door of 1,000 subscribers. Thank you as always for allowing me to be part of your day…

2 years ago · 12 likes · Anaiah Matthew

yanina’s Substack

What Price a Secure Border?

America is a nation of immigrants, with a uniquely rich and varied mix of cultures blending to make a complex and flexible whole. Yet American immigration policy has been broken for decades. All efforts at reform have foundered upon the subgroup of Republicans that wishes to clamp down on unauthorized migration from our southern border at all costs, and…

2 years ago · 5 likes · 2 comments · yanina

Thank you for reading Millennial American Dream. This post is public so feel free to share.

Andy Boenau

Oct 11, 2023

Thanks Michael. I like finding new things to read from posts like this. :)

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Reece

Thanks for sharing Michael, we really need to fix the longstanding planning and institutional issues we have with public transport if we want to convert the serious public and political support into service that gets used by the public!

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Millennial American Dream

Great Urbanist (and related) Writers

My recommendations for other substack writers you should subscribe to

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