Today I want to share an observation as a seed for future posts. The thought is simply this: Americans don’t have a shared understanding of what “City Life” is.

Since we met in our early 20s, my wife and I have always lived “in the city.” The cities we lived in were quite different, with Houston on one end of the spectrum, San Francisco on the other, and others in between. But, in each place, the locals would have agreed that we lived “in the city,” and we and our neighbors would have called the experience “city life.”

My friends and neighbors in Montrose (an inner neighborhood of Houston) had more in common with, and lived more like, my friends in NoPa (an inner neighborhood of San Francisco), than the people in Katy or Sugarland. Similarly, the people I knew from Fremont and Campbell had more in common with the people of Katy and Sugarland than they did with the people of NoPa or Montrose. The big difference between the San Francisco Bay Area and the Houston area is that SF has dozens of “city” neighborhoods, and Houston has only a small handful. But in both places, a small minority of the land area is home to “city life,” and the large majority is suburban.

Subscribe now

In America, there’s a fundamental divide. You either live City Life, or you don’t. More importantly, you either have lived City Life, or you haven’t. And the majority of Americans haven’t.1

Now, I’m identifying myself as a “city” person here, so I want to be clear: there’s nothing wrong with being a suburban or rural American. My goal is neither to criticize anyone’s preferences, nor to promote my own.

This may all seem banal, and I suppose it is. But I find that it underpins a lot of the conflicts we have in the country around issues of housing, transportation, and land use. It’s a cultural divide, and this cultural divide is enormous.

I know this divide is enormous because I experience it all the time, and so do all the “city” people I’ve known.

This plays out in conversations with other people. Suppose you meet someone at a local event, it’s very common to ask where the other person lives.2

Suburban people will say the name of their municipality, the suburb they live in. City people will say the name of their neighborhood.

In the Denver Metro area, a suburbanite would say “We live in Arvada,” or “Aurora,” or “Littleton,” or some other municipality. A city person would say “Cap Hill,” or “West Highlands,” or “Baker.”

As a city person, if you go first, you will find out immediately if the other person is a suburbanite because they won’t know where that is. But, and this is important, there are many city people who currently live in the suburbs, and you will find this out too.

If you are talking to a suburbanite, the conversation goes:

“I live in Park Hill.”

“Oh, uh, where’s that?”

“In Denver, kind of between City Park and Stapleton.”

“Oh is that, like, by the airport?”

“Oh, no not that far. It’s near the zoo.”

“Oh, that’s nice. I love the zoo.”

If you are talking to a city person, the conversation goes like this:

“I live in Park Hill.”

“Oh nice, do you go to Honey Hill a lot? I love that place.”

If you are talking to a city person who no longer lives in the city, the conversation goes:

“I live in Park Hill.”

“Oh, I love Park Hill. We’re in Westminster now, but I used to live in Congress Park.”

“Oh, that’s great, I love Congress Park.”

“Yeah, we miss it. But you know, we needed more space, and we just couldn’t afford it anymore.”

“I know, it’s hard. But Westminster’s nice, y’all have that new Alamo Drafthouse, right?”

“Yeah, it’s not bad, I love our house.”

There’s another conversation we’ve had a few dozen times. Imagine a contractor we’ve hired to do something on our house.

“I’m surprised you live downtown with kids!”

“What do you mean downtown? This isn’t downtown…”

“Oh, this is all downtown to me. Don’t you get a lot of problems? You know, with crime and everything.”

“No, actually, this neighborhood is really safe, we’ve never had a problem.”

“Oh, really? Still, I just don’t know how you deal with all the traffic and no parking.”

“It’s really not a problem. I don’t drive that much, and there’s never traffic anywhere I’m going.”

This kind of thing plays out in any number of variations.

For many years after my wife and I were married, our extended family members would assure us that living “downtown” was probably fun while we were “young” but that we’d want to move out to the suburbs once we had kids. As readers of this newsletter know, we intensely feel the opposite, that we want to live in a city neighborhood especially for the benefit of our kids via the added freedom and independence they experience.

I could give dozens more examples like this, but I think this is enough to illustrate my point.

What we’re talking about here are two different cultures, with “city” culture in America being very much a minority culture. We code-switch when we’re around most people. When we meet new people, we carefully feel out whether they’re part of our culture, and we’re careful with what we talk about, to avoid awkward or annoying conversations that we’ve had dozens of times and don’t need to have again.

That cultural divide reflects a huge difference in lived experience. And like other cultural and experiential things, it’s very hard to talk about, and easy to offend people when you do.

This plays out is in conversations with suburban friends or family. As an example, they might ask a city person why they live in the city. And the city person would probably answer by describing things they like about city life:

“We really like the walkability. There’s a coffee shop on the corner, and some restaurants in the neighborhood that we like. We walk to church on Sundays. It’s so convenient, and close to so many things to do. And it’s very social. We just really like it.”

And I know from experience that the suburban person on the other end of this is likely to bristle.

“Yes, well, I have a Starbucks five minutes down the road, and a big shopping center ten minutes away with an HEB+, which is way better than the little stores you have. And our church is fifteen minutes from our house, and I’m in a pickleball club, and all my friends live nearby. And my house is bigger and newer than yours and cost less, so I win.”

And this is just two people completely talking past each other. It’s true that the businesses and activities that exist in the city also exist in the suburbs. And it’s true that you can live in the suburbs and have a vibrant social life. So if you are just listing things that you like, this will not make sense. And as a city person, you cannot make it make sense because we don’t have words sufficient to convey the cultural experience of living inside of an urban fabric where all the parts of your life, including your home, are part of a larger whole, that you belong to, and are immersed in every time you step outside. If you have never had that lived experience, you don’t have any frame of reference to know what that means.

The one thing people tend to land on is “walkability,” because it’s the closest thing we have to a concrete concept that is always present in all places that have “City Life” and rarely present elsewhere. But even that is fading, as more suburban developments try to offer “walkability,” which manifests as wider sidewalks, or parks with “trails”, or open-air shopping centers. I’ve had suburbanite family members show me things like this and say they are “walkable,” and I can only shrug because, no, that’s not what “walkable” means to me, but there’s no point debating that because we have no shared frame of reference to understand each other.

Lastly, this is a weird gap, because the majority suburban and rural American culture is strangely blind to it.

I am a man. I know that I am not a woman. I know that I do not know what it is like to be a woman. And I would never presume to tell a woman what that’s like!

The difference between true city life and normal American suburban life is that stark. But that does not stop majority-culture suburban Americans from telling me at length what cities are like and why I’m wrong to like them etc. etc.

One last metaphor. I did my undergrad at Texas A&M. A&M is famously concerned with tradition, and has a distinct culture that some love and many don’t. Aggies have a saying, probably not unique to us, but we use it quite a lot. “From the outside looking in, you can’t understand it, and from the inside looking out, you can’t explain it.”

That is City Life in America.

A postscript: You’ll note that I didn’t even try to define City Life it in this post, and I hope you’ll understand the reason by this point. But I think about this quite a lot. I think there may be a way to quantify and describe the difference, for people who genuinely want to understand, but I’ll save that for a future post.

In my last piece I critiqued mid-century retro-futurism as an aesthetic of progress, and concluded that:

…the progress movement will ultimately need to discover a new aesthetic of progress for the 21st century; one that learns from the mistakes of the past, speaks to the hopes and fears of the present, and presents a credible vision of a genuinely better future we can achieve without erasing the past.

And discover is the right word. We’ll have to decide what we believe in, beyond simple optimism, or openness to technology and change. We’ll need to find the shared values that unite us. Then the aesthetic of progress will emerge, over time, from the work of practitioners aligned to those values.

Today I’ll share what values should guide the progress movement, and point to work that illustrates how those values are expressed aesthetically.

Subscribe now

As I wrote in my last essay, when people project images of the future, they’re telling us what they want, what they fear, and what they expect. They want to live in a verdant future with meaningful work and rich community life. They fear civilizational decline caused by environmental collapse, hypercapitalism, or both. They expect to muddle through a world of better technology that’s nevertheless ever more alienating and lonely.

These hopes and fears are not concrete policy or technical concerns, but broad expressions of experiences and values.

The progress movement seeks to cultivate a culture of progress, a broad belief that progress is possible, and enthusiasm to join the work. To achieve that goal, the movement needs to align around resonant valuesthat can guide its work.

Now, you may wonder, are we still talking about aesthetics? Yes, because aesthetics embody values. The work we do will look and feel like something, and that something will be the result of the values we hold. Work tests us and forces us to make hard decisions; what we ultimately choose will reflect and express the values we hold highest. So the arrow points both directions: thinking about aesthetics means thinking about our values, and thinking about our values means thinking about our aesthetics.

I see five values that to guide the progress movement: Continuity, Locality, Truth, Beauty, and Accessibility. These are principles that learn from the mistakes of the past, and respond to the hopes and fears of the present. Below, I’ll make the case for each value and provide examples of work that expresses it.

Continuity

Continuity is the most important clarifying principle for the aesthetics of progress. We understand progress as a change from worse to better. We’ve moved from A to B. If there is no “A,” then “B” is not progress; it’s just novelty. We cannot create worlds from nothing, therefore dreaming of “B” without “A” is fantasy.1

While fantasy can be interesting, even inspiring at times, it’s far more powerful to project and work toward a vision of the future that people can actually see themselves living in. By contrast, when we think from a blank slate, we’re ignoring the people of the present, their needs, and their problems. Continuity as a value means including them and working toward a better future that they can recognize as their own.

Continuity can also mean seeking to learn from and build upon the best of the past, rather than always starting from first principles.

Examples

The composer Christopher Tin is firmly rooted in the classical tradition, but at the same time, he’s innovative and original. He writes both choral oratorio and scores for video games. For the progress movement, the content of his work is also compelling. Consider “To Shiver the Sky, which celebrates our history of flight, while “The Lost Birds” mourns species loss.

Another recent example of continuity is Sir Jony Ive’s work on the design of the Ferrari Luce.

Ive and his team sought to combine the most powerful parts of analogue and digital displays. The design emphasizes tactility, so the driver doesn’t need to look away from the road to operate the controls. They even made the various controls sound distinct, so you can be sure you hit the switch you intended without looking.2

Locality

Humans are not global creatures of the mind. We are physical, spatial beings with finite limits. We can only be where we are, and meaningfully know roughly 150 other people. We want to love and be loved by people in proximity.

We want to be treated like people by the businesses and institutions around us, not as numbers in a database. People grumble about “nameless” and “faceless” corporations but love their local brewery.

Progress needs a healthy dynamism — a shared big picture with local distinctiveness we can personally identify with. Think of baseball, a national pastime and cultural common ground with fiercely local loyalties. You can get a hot dog at any stadium, but only the Rangers offer Dr. Pepper Bacon on a Stick. That “layered” experience pulls far more people in and creates diversity we celebrate.

Examples

Lake Flato Architects’ work incorporates both modern design and traditional vernacular inspiration. They’ve helped popularize modern designs utilizing a blend of limestone masonry and corrugated steel that draws from local materials and history, and has become the distinctive style of the Texas Hill Country.

Brad Lancaster lives in Tucson, Arizona, where the average annual rainfall is only about 12 inches. In that context, most generic development leaves the landscape barren, as it’s designed to quickly drain water away and send it downstream. But with simple adjustments to harvest the rain, Brad’s projects transform the desert environment into a verdant oasis.

Truth

Truth matters to progress in both a timely and a timeless sense. In a timely sense, our culture is dominated by a relativistic worldview that suggests things actually can’t be objectively better or worse.3

In a timeless sense, there is only progress if we can objectively evaluate real, net improvement in things that matter. Thus, the progress movement should be concerned with truth, both in the epistemic sense (that we can actually know whether things are better) and in the practical sense (that we actually achieve meaningful improvement).

There’s an opportunity to express truth in our work, and when we do, it resonates. We’re surrounded every day by things that are fake and tacky; when we see things that are real and true, we notice.

Examples

Building Culture is a development and construction led by Austin Tunnell. They specialize in building with masonry — bricks that are actually structural, rather than just a veneer. You don’t have to be an expert to perceive the difference.

Writing for Southern Urbanism, he illustrated this point so beautifully with the case of concrete flooring systems, which can be made simpler and cheaper when designed to work in compression, following the natural strength of the material.4

And the result is visually striking.

Another example is the advance of Mass Timber construction. Wood is, in many ways, the most versatile building material, and it’s also a natural carbon sink.

Projects like the Heartwood affordable housing project in Seattle have leveraged mass timber to construct lighter buildings that can be partially pre-fabricated and then assembled on site, resulting in quicker and less disruptive construction. When complete, the warm, natural feeling of the exposed structure becomes a selling point.

Beauty

Just as there is truth, there is durable, timeless beauty that transcends subjective opinion, fashion, or style. Study The Elements of Typographic Style, A Pattern Language, or The Photographer’s Eye, and you’ll find common elements of composition and proportion that come naturally to people, can be refined with practice, and consistently produce beauty.

Beauty matters because humans have a natural, positive response to it. Children learn more in beautiful classrooms. Workers are more productive in beautiful offices. Patients heal faster in beautiful hospital rooms.

Closely related to beauty are experiences of awe and wonder. Our sense of wonder cultivates curiosity and hope. And at the grandest scales, experiences of awe make people happier and more pro-social.

An explicit goal of Progress should be to be beautiful — both because it draws people in and inspires them, and because beauty is good for us. The entire point of Progress is to make life better.

Examples

Works In Progress magazine, a hub of ideas from and for the progress movement, invests in beautiful illustrations and typography, and the artistic quality of the work makes the content read as more credible. As I’ve critiqued the mid-century aesthetic as not the best fit for the progress movement, I think it’s worth pointing out that Works In Progress leans more toward Art Nouveau, especially in their print edition.5

Monumental Labs pairs advanced robotics with skilled artisans to dramatically reduce the cost of fine sculpture and architectural stonework, and their stated goal is to unleash a “golden age of art and architecture.” They’ve essentially made “beauty” a business. It’s worth browsing their website, which is itself an art-deco-inspired work of art.

Accessibility

Beauty is sometimes confused with luxury or exclusivity, but beauty is not exclusive. The natural world is full of beauty for everyone to experience. And while our consumer economy is full of places and products that make no effort to be beautiful, there are also many examples of companies that do try, and succeed at delivering beautiful products and experiences for the mainstream.

In our democratic society, only broad, inclusive progress will be durable. There will always be righteous anger against “the rich getting richer.” Progress is no project for the elite. It must be mainstream, mass market, and broadly accessible; we should earnestly pursue improvement for everyone.

Examples

I feel it’s so obvious that it’s almost a cliché, but I couldn’t not include Ikea as an example of accessibility. The combination of appealing design and low prices is so good that almost everyone ends up owning some Ikea.6

Their corporate brand is close to techno-minimalist, but particularly their “marketplace” selection has a much warmer aesthetic while still looking slightly futuristic.

If I had to pick a single practitioner and set of projects7 to exemplify a new aesthetic of progress, Earthscape would be my choice. Earthscape builds playgrounds that are essentially public art — or public art that you can climb on? Their visual style is distinctive and futuristic, but also earthy and organic. Seriously, go browse through their extensive list of projects and get inspired.

Conclusion

There’s more depth behind these values than I feel I can explore in a single essay, but I want to leave you space to consider:

• Continuity is a correction to the high modernists’ destructive attempt to erase the past and remake the world from a blank slate.

• Locality is a correction against the high modernists’ attempt to flatten the world, and, to some degree, globalization has achieved what they started.

• Truth is a correction against postmodern relativism, which undermines the idea of progress itself.

• Beauty is aspirational and persuasive; it helps win hearts and minds.

• Accessibility is grounding; it keeps us focused on solving real problems for ordinary people.

For practitioners in the progress movement, these values can help ground and guide our work, and help us craft and communicate a credible vision of the better future we’re building toward. And if we stay rooted in shared values, then, over time, a distinct and resonant progress aesthetic will emerge.

Let me know what you think in the comments — how do these values resonate for your work, and is there anything you think I missed?

This essay is the 5th (and final) piece informed by my experience at the Progress Conference this fall. If you enjoyed this piece you might like the earlier pieces as well:

• Reflections on the Progress Conference

• Was Apollo a mistake?

• Incremental Cathedrals

• Sidewalk Repair is State Capacity

• Retro-futurism is the wrong aesthetic of progress

Special thanks to Mike Riggs, Benedict Springbett, Jeff Fong, Grant Mulligan, and Pam Burleson for their feedback on many, many drafts.

When I discovered RPI, the first thing I noticed was the institute’s visual identity. They use a mid-century futurist aesthetic, with art that’s beautiful, sunny, and optimistic. It evokes the World’s Fair, the Jetsons, and classic Star Trek.

I love the RPI aesthetic. I think it perfectly fits the role that RPI is playing at this moment. And I think it would be a mistake for the progress movement at large to copy it.

Today’s visions of tomorrow

Stop for a moment and try to imagine the future. What do you see? Is the future exciting, or scary? Is it hopeful, or dark? Why do you feel that way?

Surveying the stories we tell about the future — whether for marketing, entertainment, research, or advocacy — there isn’t a single dominant narrative of the future today. Instead, we have a sense that the future is deeply uncertain, and could go radically different ways. But among all the stories, four distinct archetypes stand out. Each archetype reflects a different blend of expectations, hopes, and fears. Let’s take a look at each aesthetics of tomorrow, and what it reveals about the present.

Techno-minimalism

In many ways, the techno-minimalist aesthetic is a continuation of the mid-century aesthetic, but with the color and optimism stripped away. It’s as-if the whole world was an Apple Store, circa 2010. Its soundtrack is “Ambient Chill.”

In this vision of the future, seamlessness, design, and individualism are celebrated. Material progress and technology have “triumphed,” but it’s a hollow victory. The future is peaceful and beautiful, but it’s also cold, lonely, and isolating.

Cyberpunk

The Cyperpunk aesthetic is a more cynical rejection of mid-century futurism. Extractive corporations rule the world, the rich get ever richer, and the rest of us live on their dazzling yet dingy scraps. Somehow we all inhabit the neon-lit underbelly of an ever-rainy Tokyo. Its soundtrack is “Footwork.”

In this vision of the future, freedom, authenticity, and resistance to power are virtues, yet the inhuman machine is never toppled. Material progress has spiraled out of control. The future is creative and dynamic, but chaotic, ugly and dehumanizing.

Climate Strain

Climate strain is a less coherent idea, but is often subtly embedded into our collective imagination. As the environment degrades, civilization begins to break down. Cities are partially flooded, walled off, or falling apart, while scrappy survivors in the hinterlands re-learn to live off the land. It’s harder to capture the vibe, but if it had a soundtrack, it might be “Dune.”

In this vision of the future, grit, determination, and resilience are virtuous, but the odds are against us. It reflects a longing to have acted sooner, determination to make the most of what we’re left with, and a quiet hope that in time we may rebuild. But the dominant emotion is regretful resignation that our collective action problems can’t be solved, and will end in collapse.

Solarpunk

Sunny and optimistic, Solarpunk is a crunchy granola view of what’s to come. There’s some overlap with Afro-futurism, most prominently in Wakanda. People live in vibrant communities. Technology has become organic, buildings have green roofs and ivy-covered walls. Everyone has a green thumb. Its soundtrack might be “Lo-Fi Sunday.”

In this vision of the future, we’ve found a balance with nature. Sustainability, community, and equity are celebrated. Cities are vibrant and walkable, but also lush and park-like. The aesthetic reflects a desire to live well without living destructively, and a longing to change course without going backward. It’s a different way of life, but meaningful, warm, and inviting.

Our fears and our hopes

What stands out to me is that our three most common aesthetics are deeply negative. While the details of how things will turn out are distinct, the underlying fears are largely the same:

The environment will be worse. Techno-minimalism depicts a future that appears clean and safe, but also cold and empty. Cyberpunk depicts a future that is gritty, overcrowded, and denatured, where people are trapped in concrete and metal. Climate stain depicts a withered planet, where healthy food and clean water cannot be taken for granted.

Society will be in decline. In the techno-minimalist future, society is stable, but people seem alienated and adrift. In the cyberpunk vision, society is horribly unequal and hyper-consumerism oppresses the majority into flavors of indentured servitude. In the climate strain future, our institutions are creaking and ineffective, or already crumbled.

We’ll be lonely. In the techno-minimalist vision everyone is a single adult spending most of their time alone. Relationships are casual. We rarely see children. In the cyberpunk vision, it’s everyone for themselves in lawless anarchy. In the climate strain vision, small groups work together, but everyone is withdrawn, worn down by grief and loss; sometimes we see children playing, but their joy is bittersweet, only possible because the innocents don’t know what they’ve lost, nor how dire their lives will be.

The negativity of these visions reflects the current generation’s distrust in institutions, our anxiety over environmental quality and existential risks, and our limited hope that our fundamental problems can be solved.

The direst predictions of Cyberpunk and Climate Strain read as dystopian fantasy, but Techno-minimalism seems like where we’re headed by default. It expresses a straightforward continuation of present trends, not towards a collapse, but into a cold and lonely future where material progress is ultimately a hollow achievement.

Solarpunk is our optimistic alternative, standing in optimistic defiance of these fears. It offers an enchanting vision of a harmonious, verdant, ecologically flourishing world, full of happy people doing meaningful work, and living in community. Every aspect of the Solarpunk aesthetic confronts the dominant anxieties of the present.

What about retro-futurism?

Backward and forward looking at the same time, mid-century retro-futurism takes the space age futurist aesthetic and freshens it up, often resulting in an anachronistic mix of technologies, like holographic projectors and teleports with elaborate analog controls. The future is clean and shiny, and we got all the benefits of technology without the drawbacks. Its soundtrack might be “The Retro Cocktail Hour.”

But retro-futurism doesn’t belong on the list of aesthetics of the future, and the reason is baked into the name: the aesthetic isn’t futuristic, it’s nostalgic. Sometimes that includes a sense of longing for the future that might have been, but more often the retro-future aesthetic has faded to just a fun kind of fantasy. That is to say, retro-futurism has more in common with Steampunk than Solarpunk.

That nostalgia is exactly what the Roots of Progress taps in to. More than it wants to visualize a particular future, the RPI seeks to rekindle the spirit of progress. Their mid-century futurist art style taps into our cultural memory and reminds us of the last time the mass public believed the future would be amazing. It appeals to the entrepreneurs, innovators, advocates, and intellectuals that RPI wants to reach. It says that we’re bringing optimism back, and it resonates for people who want to be part of that.

For its mission, and this moment at the birth of a new movement, that aesthetic is a brilliant place to start. But as a new aesthetic of progress it’s a weak fit, not only because it primarily reads as nostalgic, but because it embodies a set of values the progress movement does not share.

Progress vs. High-Modernism

The progress movement does not see the future as a utopian dream. Instead, it believes in the continuous incremental improvement of the present. On this point, I’ll quote Virginia Postrel at length:

This idea of progress acknowledges that as soon as we have something, however well it meets our original desires, we see its flaws. ‘Form follows failure’, in the words of civil engineering professor Henry Petroski. Dissatisfaction drives progress. ‘Since nothing is perfect’, writes Petroski, ‘and, indeed, since even our ideas of perfection are not static, everything is subject to change over time. There can be no such thing as a “perfected” artifact; the future perfect can only be a tense, not a thing.’ In this concept of progress, glamour may inspire advancements, but it doesn’t survive their realization. New longings, derived from new forms of discontent, may then yield new glamorous concepts of the future, fueling further improvements.

This understanding is critical for a contemporary progress movement that draws some inspiration from the mid-century moment. Even though we feel nostalgia for a time when people broadly believed in progress, and the aesthetic of that time, we do not share the values of The High Modernists who created it.

That’s not how the modernists saw progress. In liberal democracies and totalitarian regimes, on the left, right, and center, among government planners and corporate efficiency experts, modernists imagined progress as aiming toward the one best way. Although they might disagree with each other, they were confident that they knew in advance what the future should look like. The modernist yearning for efficiency, order, and speed provided the leading ideology of progress in the twentieth-century and much of its enduring visual vocabulary. When today’s critics equate techno-optimism with techno-fascism, they are channeling this association: Progress means smart people sweeping away the past and deciding how everyone will live.

The modernists reimagined the world from scratch, intentionally breaking continuity and trying to reinvent the world. And they were remarkably successful. Freeways were bulldozed directly through existing neighborhoods, displacing more than a million citizens. Another 300,000 were displaced by Urban Renewal projects.

Perhaps the most visceral example is the direct translation of Le Corbusier’s concept of the Radiant City, more commonly known as “towers in the park,” to American public housing.

The “Projects” built in this model generally failed, most spectacularly in the Pruitt-Igoe project in St. Louis, which was demolished only 18 years after it was first built. The land where it sat remains vacant today.

This destructive discontinuity provoked broad backlash against the authoritarian force that was necessary to implement it, and the associated mid-century notion of technocratic “progress.”

Like all aesthetics, the mid-century futurist aesthetic reflects the values of the High Modernists who created it. It embodies a longing for space, light, and cleanliness; freedom from a recent past of war and chaos. It represents values of progress through technology, top-down order, and expert design. It emphasizes then-new construction techniques, using concrete and steel to defy the constraints of carpentry or masonry, symbolically declaring that the limits of the material world will be overcome.

We imagined the Magic Highway of Tomorrow. We got Stroads

The mid-century aesthetic faded away when the ideas it stood for were specifically rejected. In the 1960s and 70s, activists pushed back against top-down control and demanded public participation. Thinkers like Jane Jacobs and Christopher Alexandercelebrated the learned wisdom of traditional buildings and neighborhoods while shredding the failures of the high-modernist experts. And iconic books like the Population Bomb and Limits to Growth proclaimed that the limits of the material world could not be overcome.

I said above that today’s negative view of progress reflects the current generation’s distrust in institutions, our anxiety over environmental quality and existential risks, and our limited hope that our fundamental problems can be solved. We must understand: those fears stem directly from the failed attempt by the top-down mid-century high modernists to reinvent the world. That’s what killed the spirit of progress. Today’s progress movement should be verycareful about drawing too much from their work.

Discovering a new aesthetic

The progress movement is built around one primary idea:

We need a new philosophy of progress for the 21st century. One that teaches people not to take the modern world for granted. One that acknowledges the problems of progress, confronts them directly, and offers solutions. And one that holds up a positive vision of the future.

Of the popular aesthetics of the future that exist today, it’s clear that Solarpunk is the closest to a contemporary aesthetic of progress. Solarpunk directly addresses today’s fears and struggles, and imagines solutions that resonate with today’s values.

But, unfortunately, Solarpunk shares a flaw with mid-century futurism: it’s too far removed from the present. Solarpunk rarely engages with what happened to the world we live in now. Where are the partial retrofits, the scaffolding, or the old strip malls? What happened to our downtowns, our industrial parks, or our gated subdivisions? Dreaming from a blank slate makes for engaging fantasy, but it’s a trap.

The progress movement should learn from and be influenced by the social and environmental optimism of Solarpunk. We can also take some inspiration from the technological optimism of mid-century art, even as a movement that acknowledges the problems of progress must also confront the failures of mid-century futurism and avoid repeating them.

But I conclude that the progress movement will ultimately need to discover a new aesthetic of progress for the 21st century; one that learns from the mistakes of the past, speaks to the hopes and fears of the present, and presents a credible vision of a genuinely better future we can achieve without erasing the past.

And discover is the right word. We’ll have to decide what we believe in, beyond simple optimism, or openness to technology and change. We’ll need to find the shared values that unite us. Then the aesthetic of progress will emerge, over time, from the work of practitioners aligned to those values.

Thank you to many friends from the Roots of Progress who provided feedback as I worked on this essay, including , , , and Mike Riggs, and special thanks to Pam Burleson who patiently discussed at least a dozen variations to help me figure out what I was trying to say.

It’s school choice season in Denver right now, and my family is waiting to hear back about which (public) schools our children will be admitted to next year.

Colorado has offered statewide school choice since the early 90’s, which means that, in theory, any kid can attend any public school in the state, regardless of where they live. In practice, the parents have to be able to get their child to and from the school, and some schools get more applicants than they have seats. So it’s more accurate to say that parents can apply to any public school in the area, and if there’s room, or they win the school’s admission lottery, then the children can go there. Which brings us to February in my home.

As a parent who cares a lot about cities, and about autonomy for children, schools are critical. One of the main reasons people move to particular neighborhoods or suburbs is to get their children into particular schools. School choice loosens that coupling.

As a young adult, I felt that school choice was obviously the morally right policy. I don’t align closely to any particular political ideology, but I would say I lean libertarian. I think that freedom and competition are good. For many years, I would have argued for more than just public school choice; I would have told you we should give parents vouchers and let them pick whatever school they think is best.

The mainstream system, where public schools are based on zoning, and wealthy neighborhoods get the best schools (or, good schools draw in rich families who price out others) is obviously inequitable. And the fact that rich families can afford private school as an alternative, while most families can’t, is also obviously inequitable. School choice clearly helps level that playing field, and a full voucher system levels it even more.

But, now that my family lives in a school choice system, I’m deeply ambivalent about it.

We are fortunate in that there are three public elementary schools within a mile of our house. For this discussion, I’ll call them School A, B, and C.

When we first moved to Denver, we were living three blocks from School A. We had missed the school choice window, but we were guaranteed a seat at the closest school. We were excited to have a school so close by, and to be able to easily walk the kids there and back each day. We heard good things from a few other parents in the neighborhood. We stayed exactly one semester before taking our kids out.

The reason is pretty simple. School A follows a very unorthodox curriculum and has an intense ideological lean. I’ll never forget going to pick up one day, and a giant group of kids were outside performing a mock protest. They were marching around and chanting, while the teachers watching were beaming at them and telling the parents how proud they were of their “little citizens.” We’re talking about a bunch of 6-8 year old kids who clearly did not understand the buzzwords they were shouting. Meanwhile, my kids weren’t learning math. We felt this was inappropriate for a public school.

This brings us to the two other nearby schools, School B and School C.

We initially applied to School B. It’s the most traditional elementary school, it has a “gifted and talented” magnet program, and is extremely highly rated. There are more applicants than seats at School B, so they use a weighted lottery to decide who gets in. As a new family to the district, my kids had not been assessed for the GT program, and it was also a few blocks further away (so not our closest school), so we didn’t get any “preference” in that lottery. One child got in, the other two did not.

We ended up enrolling in School C because they all got in.

School C is a public charter. They focus on raising student ambitions. They wear uniforms and emphasize discipline. And the school is much more racially and socioeconomically diverse than School A or School B. I don’t have data on the school, but it seems that every racial group in Denver is proportionally represented. The range of family incomes is also wide.

We see this as a huge benefit. While School A preached social justice, all the kids were white and somewhere between middle class and rich. School C doesn’t teach about racial tensions or social justice much, if at all. Instead, the kids get a lived experience that’s egalitarian and nearly “colorblind.” The only drawback of this is that School C is not rooted in the neighborhood. As far as I can tell, about 1/3 of the students live nearby, while 2/3 commute in. The school looks like a cross-section of the Denver metro area because it is.

Our kids have had a good experience at School C. They’ve done well academically, and we feel they’ve benefitted immensely from making friends of all different backgrounds.

But this school choice season, we’re waiting to hear if we got into School B. The kids are qualified for the GT magnet now. They’ve complained about being bored in class, and School C doesn’t have a more challenging track available. We’re hoping the advanced program at School B will be fun and engaging for them, and we see some upside of meeting a new group of kids who mostly live nearby. At the same time, we’re anxious about how it will work out, and feel it’s a loss for our children to move to a less diverse school.

Now, we’ve discussed there being three schools in the neighborhood, but there are also neighborhood kids who commute out of the neighborhood for school. There are many reasons. Schools often have niche programs the parents are interested in. Or perhaps they started at a school across town when they lived nearby, and now they’ve moved but don’t want to change. Or the school across town is easier for the parents’ work logistics. Beyond the public schools, there are also plenty of private schools in the area. And to round it out, we know a few families in the neighborhood who homeschool.

One part of me see this and thinks, “this is what human freedom looks like, and that’s a good thing!” But as a parent who is very invested in my neighborhood, I also find that there’s a downside. My kids have friends in the neighborhood, but they don’t know a large percentage of the children who live close by. They all go to different schools.

I see two dilemmas here, and I find myself really torn.

(1) A lot of demand for school choice ends up being ideological.

We always wanted to put our kids in the neighborhood school. But when that school is more focused on encouraging activists than teaching multiplication… we can’t do it. To me, that school has broken trust. From the conversations I have with other parents, this seems to be a widespread problem.

School choice gives parents a chance to find a school they can trust. But on the other hand, it seems to create incentives for schools to actively tailor themselves to a particular ideology to attract parents and keep enrollment up. That in turn creates a huge burden on parents to find a school they feel is trustworthy. And it seems all but certain to me that this sorting must make polarization and tribalism worse over the long run, as people self-isolate into echo chambers. When we have fewer reasons to rub up against neighbors whose views differ from our own, we get less practice talking across differences, which makes us less civil!

(2) Commuting to school leaves the neighborhood weaker.

The school has historically been one of the core civic institutions in most neighborhoods, a common ground that brings families together and fosters relationships.

As most parents will tell you, you end up being friends with the parents of your kids’ friends. Kids are just so good at making friends, they pull you along for the ride. And that’s a lot of fun! But commuting across town for structured play dates is not fun, nor is having lonely kids who rarely see their favorite friends.

Working through all of this, I reflect back to my childhood school experiences. In elementary school, we lived in a rural area and drove to a small, private school on the other side of the nearby town. I ended up homeschooling for middle school. Then we moved to Texas and I went to the local public high school.

I think the private school was fine, but I was too young to remember much about it. What I do remember is that I liked my school friends, but rarely saw them — they lived too far apart.

What I remember about homeschooling was that I had a blast racing through the subjects that interested me, but I got behind in the ones that didn’t. I also remember being very lonely.

My public school was bland, boring, and not academically challenging. But it wasn’t polarizing. It was the local school, and everyone who lived nearby went there.

It’s almost like, if we just had one school, and all the kids went there, and it was academically rigorous, and non-ideological… that would be pretty great for the kids and the community. But that isn’t how it ever was for me growing up. I know that a few places (and schools) like that exist, but we’ve had public schools for a century, and we clearly don’t know how to guarantee they turn out like this.

I wrote this essay because it’s something I’m thinking about a lot this time of year, but I don’t have a critique, a recommendation, or an answer.

The system in Colorado seems to work in the sense that I don’t really hear neighborhood parents tell me they’re considering moving just for the schools.1 That seems like a win! But it’s also a shame that there are obviously so many kids in the neighborhood who never meet, thanks to the “school commuter” lifestyle they live.

I think this is just a legitimately hard social problem. And for those of us who self-identify as urbanists, and care deeply about the vitality of our neighborhoods, I’m not sure it’s a problem we grapple with enough.

The best way to describe this is with a few examples.

The original network effect

A single telephone is useless — there’s no one to call! Two telephones are barely useful. But as each new person got a phone, the value of owning one increased for everyone already connected. That’s the network effect: each new user adds value for all existing users.

By the early 20th century, this effect made AT&T into a natural monopoly so complete that the U.S. government regulated it as a utility. No competitor could gain a foothold because no one wanted to join a phone network where they couldn’t reach everyone else, and everyone else was already using AT&T.

But that’s not the only way a market can collapse toward a single option.

Cash

From the individual perspective, it makes no difference how anyone else pays for things. Neither your cash nor your debit or credit cards “work better” or “do more” when more people use them.

According to the Federal Reserve, cash, credit, and debit are all about equally popular. More than 90% of consumers say they intend to keep using cash, and nearly 80% carried cash on their person during any given month. You’d think that in a free market with three equally popular payment methods, merchants would be happy to accept them all.

But despite the general popularity of cash, as the majority of purchases move to credit and debit cards, it’s becoming common to find merchants that don’t take cash at all. That makes cash less useful, which forces some people who would rather use cash to have a card as well, which gives merchants even less reason to deal with cash.

The feedback loop looks like a network effect, but the cause is different. It doesn’t happen because users benefit from other users. It’s caused by the cost of maintaining two systemswhen having only one would be easier and cheaper. And so this effect is playing out, even though the change is so unpopular that some cities and states are now passing laws to stop it.

Cash and cards are mostly symmetrical. No matter how you pay, the value of money is the same. Almost anything you can use one for, you can use the other for.

When the options are asymmetrical, this effect is even more powerful.

Smartphones

More businesses and institutions are moving to web and mobile apps as their only interface. Ninety-one percent of U.S. adults now own a smartphone, so our whole society has started treating the smartphone as the default interface, ignoring the people who don’t have them.

This is a lot like the momentum to converge on cards over cash, but with one key difference. A person with a smartphone can still pay in person, read a paper menu, and use a printed ticket. But if you don’t have a smartphone, you can’t use a parking app, scan a QR code menu, pull up a mobile boarding pass, etc. The substitution is strictly one-directional. That’s the one-way ratchet.

This effect is inequitable for adults, but painful for parents and children.

The majority of parents would prefer their children not have phones before age 14, but the 81% have one before age 12. Two-thirds of parents report feeling pressured to give their children smartphones. My wife and I have felt that pressure for our kids. As their friends are getting phones, more of their activities assume they have one. The logistics will keep getting harder, until we’ll eventually have to get each kid a phone, lest they be excluded.

That’s the one-way ratchet at work. In this case, a majority would prefer not to need phones for their kids, but those who are able will buy them anyway because the one-way substitution makes it too costly not to opt-in.

Driving

Before cars, cities were pedestrian-oriented. How else could they be? But as automobiles arrived, cities began to change.

It’s worth noting that automobiles were controversial. Most people were happy with their lifestyle and logistics. Cars were expensive, and many people didn’t feel they were worth the cost. People were also angry about cars speeding through their neighborhoods and running people over. There were anti-car protests, and proposals to ban them from central areas, or require governors to limit their speed.1

But the number of drivers increased, cities changed. City and state governments widened roads. Property owners tore down buildings to make parking lots. Each accommodation for the new driving minority made driving better and walking worse, which nudged the walking majority toward switching.

The biggest ratchet was building new places that you couldn’t reach without a car. Driving could substitute for walking, but walking could not substitute for driving. Developers started building subdivisions without sidewalks, set-back strip malls, and cul-de-sacs miles from the nearest streetcar stop.2

As people who preferred the early suburbs moved out, the friends and family who preferred to stay in the city nevertheless had stronger and stronger reasons to eat the cost and get a car.

This is fascinating because cars actually have an inverse network effect. Every other driver on the road is in your way, causing traffic jams and making it harder to park. The more people started driving, the worse everything got. But once the government prioritized cars, degrading the pedestrian environment in cities and requiring car-orientation for all new development, there was no going back.

That one-way ratchet explains how we could end up with a situation like the one we have today. Around half of Americans would prefer to live in a highly walkable area and not drive or minimize driving, but only 8% live in an actually walkable neighborhood.

The ratchet makes it nearly impossible for cities or developers to respond to this demand. Suppose you owned a 4ac vacant lot within an old, walkable city. You could fill it in with more walkable mixed use, or you could plop a big box store on it, either one could work. But if you owned a 4ac vacant lot in the suburbs, you couldn’t build anything walkable on it because it’s not connected to a walkable surrounding context. There’s nothing to walk to! Your option is car-oriented or nothing.

Now that America’s old, walkable neighborhoods have been surrounded by car-only development, we basically can’t create new walkable development, unless we build whole new towns from scratch. That’s really hard, so it rarely happens.3

What makes the one-way ratchet worth naming is that it reveals a limit of free markets. Nobody has to conspire to eliminate the minority (or majority!) option. No regulator has to mandate it away. The system just gradually stops serving a category of people. The ratchet only turns one way, and once that happens, it’s very, very hard to go back.

Urban Proxima

Strong Towns

The Strong Towns perspective, as articulated by Andrew Burleson, combines a lot of my YIMBY impulses with ideas about what we need from our public infrastructure. In particular, the way we build streets determines whether a car becomes mandatory to participate in society and, subsequently, has downstream effects on everything from public finances to whether a neighborhood is safe for children…

Listen now

3 months ago · 2 likes · 1 comment · Jeff Fong and Andrew Burleson

It was a fun discussion, where we covered a few of my favorite topics.

• Unproductive land use and the fiscal problems most cities face

• How the pre-war development model was fast, and things we can learn from it

• The legitimate challenges of car-only transportation

• Ideas for better suburban growth

• Thoughts on parenting in cities and freedom for kids

I think my audio could have been better (😅), but overall I thought it came out pretty well. If you heard it (or go listen now), happy to answer questions or hear your feedback here. Thanks!

Our neighborhood’s sidewalks have been in mediocre shape for years, with a lot of cracked and uneven slabs, and even a handful of potholes. As a parent, I had to keep an eye out for all these trip-hazards when we’d walk around with the kids… it’s no fun when your toddler ends up sprawled across the concrete.

Run-down sidewalks are a pretty common problem across the country, in part because they exist in a bit of infrastructural limbo. While sidewalks are part of the right of way and obviously serve the general public, most cities expect each individual property owner to maintain their sidewalk individually. But this rarely happens because replacing concrete is difficult and expensive.

When I looked into it, just replacing a few cracked sidewalk sections in front of my house was $3,000! And while laying fresh concrete is somewhat DIY-friendly, replacing an old slab is really not.1

A few years ago, Denver voters approved a programto solve this. Most residents pay $150 per year, and the city takes full responsibility for maintaining the sidewalks.

This fall, the work crews appeared in my corner of town. They surveyed existing conditions, using spray paint to indicate which sections needed to be replaced, which ones could be leveled without replacement (grinding down small ledges, etc.), and which sections needed more careful work to deal with underlying tree roots or other complications. A few days later, the traffic cones appeared, and everyone moved their cars out of the way. The crews generally did a few block faces at a time: removing the old sidewalk with a small excavator and laying wooden forms on day one, pouring the new sidewalk sections on day two, and cleaning up on day three. It took less than two weeks to repair the entire neighborhood (about 90 blocks).

On its face, this is a pretty mundane story. City repairs infrastructure, “yawn.”

But what I didn’t anticipate is how excited everyone in the neighborhood was about this, how much it was the “talk of the town” for weeks. When the crews arrived on our block, we came out to say hello and thank them for their work. I was surprised to see most of the neighbors did the same. The kids were thrilled by the excavator and the cement truck, and the crew were all smiles as they demonstrated how it works.

The foreman told me this was one of the most fun jobs they’d ever had, that people had been bringing them snacks and drinks the whole time. You’d think that people would be grumpy about the disruption of several days of construction right in front of their homes, but instead the project was like a slow-motion community parade.

One of the hot topics of 2025 was State Capacity. Books like Abundance and Why Nothing Works had a lot to say about our inability to build enough housing, regional power lines, and commuter rail. There’s a general sense that government in America is too bogged down in vetocracy to get things done.

But the big failures at the top of the system should not be surprising in light of the dysfunction at the base. When our cities and towns can’t maintain basic infrastructure, we don’t have the foundation of institutional capacity and civic trust to do bigger things at the state or national level. Sidewalk repair is state capacity.

And for people who care about building state capacity, I think Denver’s program is a good model. Voters were asked a simple question (Do you want the city to repair sidewalks?) and they approved a new tax to fund it. The city put the program together, is doing a good job delivering, and people noticed! The next time the city puts a question to voters, they’ll be more likely to trust that the city can deliver results.

But for advocates who want to see government solve problems, it’s important to understand that state capacity starts at the local level, and there’s no shortcut to building it. We need to care deeply about maintaining our sidewalks, our drinking water, our schools, our parks, and our libraries. When we can’t do those things, we should be obsessed with figuring out what’s wrong and fixing it. With a strong foundation of high-functioning local government, we’ll have a much better chance of building effective state and national institutions.

Governance Cybernetics

San Francisco's Marina Could Get 790 Homes. Mayor Daniel Lurie Says No. YIMBYs Say Yes.

Here is a sequence of events worth examining…

Read more

4 months ago · 10 likes · 2 comments · Dave Deek

I don’t live in San Francisco anymore, and I’m not writing to opine on the particular project. Rather, I want to share a few thoughts on this kind of project. Specifically, I think that large projects with shiny renderings tend to draw a disproportionate amount of pro-housing advocates attention. While projects like this will be part of the housing solution, I don’t think they’re the answer to our housing problems, and I don’t think we should overly focus on them.

Why do I say that?

First, large redevelopment projects will always be relatively few in number.

• These projects require enormous skill and capital to execute. There aren’t that many developers with the access to capital or the skill to deploy many projects like this. I’m skeptical that there are even 100 development companies that could execute this kind of project.

• Even if I’m wrong about how many developers are capable of delivering projects on this scale, there’s a finite number of sites that are viable for this kind of project. The Safeway in the Marina is uniquely under-developed relative to its location near the heart of America’s second most important city center, already surrounded by dense, mixed-use development.1 There’s no shortage of under-developed land, but most of it could not redevelop anywhere at anywhere near the level of the Marina site.

Second, large redevelopment projects like this are uniquely political.

• Because they are large, they’re extremely visible, and because they will always be relatively few in number, it’s easy for opponents to organize against them.

• It’s also much easier to make people upset about something concrete — “this tower will block your view of the bay!” — than it is to rally against something abstract like single-stair reform.

Third, I’m skeptical that large projects like this could actually scale to meet the housing need in supply-constrained cities, even if they were politically easy to get approved and built.

• No single project (of any scale) provides enough units to matter. Let’s assume, optimistically, the Marina project will make it through from concept to completion in 5 years. That means its delivering 158 units per year, which is great! But it’s nowhere near enough to meet San Francisco’s housing needs on its own.

• As mentioned previously, there are a limited number of redevelopment sites that can even support large-scale projects like this.

• Even we assume there were 100 capable firms executing these projects in parallel, and that they’d never run out of viable sites, that would net 15,800 units per year. That would be great! But, for context, it’s still less than the 20k + ADUs California has been adding annually.

Now, I’m not trying to argue that projects like this are good or bad, or that we should or should not do them. In the context of San Francisco, the Marina project makes sense to me, I think it should go forward.

But I often run into pro-housing advocates who, I think, are overly focused on bulldozing the political obstacles in front of large-scale projects because they think that large-scale projects are the answer, singular. And I think that misunderstands the reality on the ground.

As a case in point, I’ve heard housing advocates characterize California’s ADU program as a modest “take what you can get” reform, even though ADUs are probably already adding more units per year than we could achieve via large-scale apartment projects. That’s an error in thinking.

Housing markets are not made of a few local projects, they’re made of regional aggregates. Even in smaller cities there are tens of thousands of lots, the biggest cities contain millions of parcels. Reforms that apply to millions of parcels are going to unlock more housing than reforms that only apply to hundreds of parcels.

Consider this napkin sketch to illustrate:

If we take the zip code 94116 as representative of the Outer Sunset, it contains 16,139 housing units in 2.53 square miles, or 6,379 units per square mile. The Outer Sunset is often criticized as an area that has resisted new housing units and needs to develop further — I agree with that. But there are several hundred zip codes in the Bay Area, and very few of them are near this level of development.

To take one example, let’s look at 94061, in Redwood City. The zip code is currently 54% as dense as the Outer Sunset; 14,006 housing units over 3.86 square miles, or 3,628 units per square mile. The area has some sites that could redevelop into apartment buildings, but the majority of lots are single family homes. The biggest opportunity is to open up new housing options for all those existing homeowners. That means allowing a family to build a backyard cottage for their aging parents to move into, a retiree to convert their basement into an accessory apartment for some extra cash flow, or a local builder to convert a run down house into a duplex or triplex.

If those options were allowed by right, this part of Redwood City could mature to the level of the Outer Sunset; still predominately single family residential, but up from 14,006 homes to 24,623, an increase of 10,617 homes.

There are 323 zip codes in the broader Bay Area, although some of these are quite far from the city, and some contain mostly mountainous terrain. If we passed reform that that permitted ten thousand new homes in half of these, it would unlock 1.6 million new homes.

This is why the Strong Towns Housing Ready Toolkit focuses on reform that can unlock incremental infill and evolution across entire regions, not just ideally located grocery stores.

I think my thoughtful YIMBY friends already know this — they’re pragmatic folks. But I don’t know if the median YIMBY is as excited about the power of incrementalism as they should be. Incremental housing is no half-loaf; the most scalable reforms are the ones that open up responsive housing supply within the neighborhoods that constitute the vast majority of our developed land today.

Utilitarian vs. Inspirational Projects

Whether a project is worthwhile depends on why we’re undertaking it.

The majority of projects are utilitarian in nature. We’re doing them because we want to achieve some concrete outcome. In that case, the success of the project is a question of whether we achieved the outcome, and whether the cost of the project was less than the value it generated.

But some projects are different.

For the last 140 years, the people of Barcelona have been erecting the Sagrada Família. The basilica, envisioned by Antoni Gaudí in the 1880s, is expected to be completed next year. If you’re not familiar with the project, this video gives a sense of the work, and the significance of what should be the final generation of construction.

Majestic as the basilica is, you could imagine skeptical critiques. Four generations to complete it? Can you even imagine the budget overruns? But those critiques are missing the point. How would you measure “return on investment” for a building that is meant to last for millennia?1

The building’s purpose is to stretch the upper limits of art and beauty. When you’re building something for the glory of God, then it doesn’t really matter how long it takes. Spending generations to build it is an act of worship.

Sagrada Família isn’t a utilitarian project, it’s an inspirational project. It demonstrates what humanity can achieve when we commit to do work for its own sake.

Returning to Apollo: Scholl’s criticism, that the program was not a viable path to opening a sustainable age of space travel, still stands. If you consider it as a utilitarian project, it failed. But that’s not why we did it. Apollo was pursued for its own sake, as an inspiration and a challenge, and presented to the world as such.2

The Accidental Cathedral

Truly inspirational projects starts with a monumental design that exceeds current capacity to deliver. Whether that’s building a majestic cathedral, or a literal moonshot, we’re aspiring to do something remarkable, at the very limit of our capabilities. For an inspirational project, the challenge is the point. But there’s a risk here: when we dream grand dreams of progress, sometimes we mistake a utilitarian project for an inspirational one.

Consider the mega-project that has become the butt of all jokes: California’s High-Speed Rail. Planning started in 1996. Voters approved substantial funding in 2008. Construction of a small portion began in 2015. The dream is to connect San Francisco to San Diego, but Californians are currently hoping they can ride from Merced to Bakersfield by 2032.

California HSR started from a monumental design that exceeded the capacity of the state to execute, so it’s not surprising that it has struggled. But passenger rail is not an inspirational project to be undertaken for its own sake; the goal is to achieve a concrete, operational outcome that has already been proven around the world. A smarter approach would have been to develop a series of smaller, utilitarian projects as steps toward the long-term vision, building capacity along the way. As capacity increased, the complexity and ambition of subsequent projects could increase.

Critically, that doesn’t mean that there shouldn’t be an ambitious vision. But grand visions are easy; a viable plan to deliver the vision is the difference between successful projects and science fiction.

As a real-world example, consider the incremental modernization of the Italian railways. Rather than try to engineer a massive system to a finished state, the Italian approach was to consider the many bottlenecks in their rail system every year, and to improve them one by one as funding allowed. There was no magical moment when Italy rebuilt its railways, the system just got a bit better every year.

Taking the monumental approach doesn’t mean that California HSR won’t be finished. It might mean that it will take 140 years.

The Incremental Cathedral

Sometimes I get pushback on incremental thinking, that our problems are “too big” and that we need mega projects to address them. But I think that pushback reflects a misunderstanding. Incrementalism is not an outcome, it’s a strategy to actually deliver outcomes.

First, even inspirational projects tend to be incremental in execution. Construction techniques and aesthetic details evolved throughout the construction of the Sagrada Família, even as it stayed true to its original vision. The moon landing was preceded by the Mercury and Gemini programs, as well as the earlier Apollo missions, that pushed NASA’s capability forward one step at a time. There’s no shortcut to building capacity if you want to do great things, and the best way to build capacity is to have short feedback loops that facilitate learning and experimentation.

Second, inspirational outcomes don’t always require monumental projects.

Wrigley Field, home of the Chicago Cubs, is one of the most beloved public buildings in the United States. For the city of Chicago, it serves as a landmark, tourist attraction, and cultural anchor, much like the role the Sagrada Família plays in the city of Barcelona.

First constructed in less than three months in the spring of 1914, Wrigley Field has undergone a series of expansions and reconfigurations over time. It was nearly doubled in size in 1923. The left field bleachers were moved back in 1925 to reduce the number of home runs. An upper deck was added in 1928. The outfield walls were covered in ivy in 1937. Lights were added to the field in 1988. The bleachers were rebuilt in 2005. And the recent “1060 project” updated many more aspects of the stadium.

Stewart Hicks’ video on Wrigley gives a sense of the evolution of the facility and how it has deeply integrated with the surrounding neighborhood over time, but also, how and why the incremental evolution of the park created a community anchor.

Wrigley didn’t start with a monumental design, but you could say that, over time, the ballpark learned how to be better and better. The end result couldn’t have been designed up front because the incremental evolution itself is an inherent part of the inspirational outcome. There’s something magical, almost spiritual, in continuity; in projects and places that retain a meaningful connection to their past, even as they change and grow. In a sense, Wrigley Field represents an Incremental Cathedral.

So, we should boldly undertake “moonshots” when we believe the effort is valuable for its own sake, and avoid them when we want to achieve utilitarian, operational outcomes. But we should also keep in mind that an incremental / operational approach isn’t a limit to our ambition. In fact, it’s the foundation underneath most of our achievements.

The Roots of Progress published the session on YouTube, and helpfully put part of his Apollo/Concorde comments in the intro, so you can easily see for yourself.

His full comments start about 21 minutes in.

Here’s the gist of the argument:

The purpose of the Apollo mission was for the US to demonstrate technological and economic superiority over the Soviet Union. Similarly, Concorde was primarily pursued as a joint program by the UK and France to demonstrate their technological prowess.

Neither project was designed for economic viability (at its peak, Apollo represented nearly 7% of federal discretionary spending!). To sustain space launches or supersonic travel, we needed an economic base that could justify continuous investment and innovation over time. Lacking that economic footing, both programs eventually faded out.

When NASA stepped back to humbler missions in the wake of Apollo, the dreams of a “space age” faded. Similarly, after Concorde failed, supersonic travel was seen as wishful thinking, or fantasy. This disillusionment was famously summed up by Peter Thiel, who quipped, “We wanted flying cars, but we got 140 characters.”

Thiel’s quote is a hell of a zinger, but fundamentally silly. It’s true that we haven’t quite gotten flying cars (although we’re getting close!). But the Internet is a marvel of civilization-wide engineering, giving us capabilities that would have been “indistinguishable from magic” to earlier generations. In fact, the development of the Internet is an excellent counter-example to the Apollo and Concorde programs.

The research that laid the foundation for the Internet ramped up in the 1960’s. That research led to the development of the ARPANET, an early computer network, funded by DARPA, to connect computers at major universities and research labs. In 1969 — the same year Apollo 11 landed on the moon — the first four nodes of the ARPANET were connected (UCLA, UCSB, Stanford, and the University of Utah). Other computer networks soon followed.

By the 1970s, the value of these computer networks had been well-established, and the next obvious step was to enable connections between them. To solve this, a working groupof researchers developed protocols that every network could follow, and thus allow traffic to flow between them. At first this meant domestic networks could connect to each other, but during the in 1980’s the Internet went global, as the networks of Europe and Asia connected to the networks of North America. By 1993, the foundation was ready for Tim Berners-Lee’s introduction of the World Wide Web — the thing we think of as the Internet today.

Sustained Progress is an abstraction over the possible.

At each step in the development of early computers and the networks connecting them, very hard problems had to be solved; and at each step, the previous set of problems needed to be sufficiently well-solved that the solution could be assumed, so that people could concentrate their effort on the next challenge.

• The first pioneers could assume the existence of telephone lines, and focus on overcoming the limitations of circuit-switching and develop packet-switching networks.

• Once computer networks were established, researchers could assume their existence and viability, and focus on developing the Internet Protocol to integrate them.

• Once national networks existed, companies could justify building global telecommunications links to bridge them.

• Once he could assume that the world was already connected by a global computer network, Tim Berners-Lee could introduce the World Wide Web for the whole of humanity to build on.

• And now we live in a world of hypermedia, where information is instantaneously available everywhere, on ubiquitous devices that we carry with us at all times, easily produced and distributed by anyone, at any time, on demand.

There’s a paradox here. Human nature being what it is, the ultimate accomplishment of progress is to be taken for granted. And I would argue that, if the broad public can’t take it for granted, it isn’t really Progress at all! But, because true Progress must be something people can take for granted, it’s easy for us to misunderstand the nature of Progress itself.

When I was drafting this essay I came across another by the University of Washington’s Hans Jochen Scholl, who put it this way:

At the core of Thiel’s narrative lies a romantic expectation that innovation should appear as discrete, dramatic breakthroughs—visible, monumental, and physical. Yet history and philosophy suggest otherwise. As Hegelian dialectics reminds us, quantity and quality are interdependent: Cumulative incremental changes often precipitate qualitative leaps. What appears slow and marginal in the short term can, over time, cross a threshold and reorder entire systems.

…

Thiel also misses a core insight from modern innovation theory: most breakthroughs are recombinations of existing components. Joseph Schumpeter’s notion of “creative destruction” and Brian Arthur’s work on technology evolution both underscore that novelty rarely emerges fully formed. The airplane synthesized engines, aerodynamics, and lightweight materials; the smartphone combined telephony, microprocessors, GPS, and the internet. The same holds for AI: No single eureka moment, but decades of recombination reaching critical mass.

To privilege spectacular, stand-alone inventions as the only metric of progress is to misunderstand how transformation actually occurs.

Returning to Blake Scholl’s point: Apollo and Concorde were remarkable, inspiring demonstrations of the uppermost limits of the technology of their time. But in a sense, they did not represent true Progress, because they could not be sustained.

Perhaps ironically, today we see sustained progress in space technology, as SpaceX is pushing down the cost curve of space access, and monetizing it via Starlink, an Internet Service Provider.

So is Blake Scholl right? Was Apollo a mistake?

I wouldn’t go so far as to say we should never take “moonshots.” But I think we need to know, going in, what it is we’re trying to achieve. Tech demos can push the limits of our knowledge, but they don’t automatically lead to sustained progress. Each increment of progress “stands on the shoulders” of what came before, and true progress only comes when there’s a sustainable foundation underneath it to build upon.

Thanks to and for their feedback on this essay.

Some of you may know, I’m a former urban planner, and long-time “urbanism” advocate, but my day job is now in Software Engineering, specializing in web applications.

Today, in the spirit of Thanksgiving, I want to take a moment to appreciate what a marvel the Internet is. Yes, that Internet, the one you’re using to read this post. I know, old news, we’re used to it. At this point, we all take it for granted. But we shouldn’t!

Picture this. Somebody sends you a link to a viral tweet. You click on it, and it loads on your phone. You chuckle. But do you ever stop to think about what it takes to make that happen?

To help you appreciate this magical technology we all use every day, I’m going to give you a high-level walkthrough of the civilization-level effort required to load a tweet. Here’s how it works:

First, the app on your phone creates what’s called an HTTP Request. HTTP stands for “Hypertext Transfer Protocol.” It’s a way of formatting messages for computers to send back and forth that was originally designed for serving web pages (hence the “hypertext”), but has been extended to cover the majority of traffic on the Internet.

An HTTP Request is plain text. To load some page or data from the web, you’d normally send a GET request, which looks like this:

GET /DennysDiner/status/1989813917359509530 HTTP/1.1
Host: x.com
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 15_7_2) AppleWebKit/605.1.15 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/26.0 Safari/605.1.15
Accept: text/html

That request specifies the content your phone wants to load. There’s another computer, somewhere out in the world (probably in a datacenter in Northern Virginia), that can respond to that request and send back the content. But neither you nor your phone know where that computer is. So how do you send it your message?

Finding and connecting to that other computer is the problem the Internet solves.

The HTTP Request specifies a “host,” which is the human-readable domain name used by that other computer. To send that computer a message, it needs the Internet Protocol (IP) Address for that computer, so it performs a Domain Name Service (DNS) Lookup, which involves recursively searching a series of databases until it finds a match.

First, the phone checks its own database. If you’ve loaded something from “x.com” recently, the phone has already looked up the IP Address and can use it again. If not, it sends a message to ask the nearest cell tower, which in turn asks the cellular provider’s network, which in turn asks the other internet providers it’s connected to, and so on, until one of the computers in that chain finds the address and sends it back down the chain. Finally, your phone will learn that the IP Address for x.com is 172.66.0.227.

Note that this involves two other technological miracles that we’re going to skip right past:

• Your phone is using a cellular network, which means it can’t just send messages over a wire like the internet was designed for, it has to broadcast radio signals to, and receive radio signals from, cellular towers that are wired to the internet. That uses an entirely different, but equally amazing, stack of networking technology.

• Actually, “x.com” has many IP addresses, and deciding which one your phone will get is handled by a service called Cloudflare; another technological marvel that solves a whole category of problems related to serving more internet traffic than any one computer could ever handle.

Once your phone has the IP address, it can send packets — tiny messages — to that address. So the phone sends packets through the cellular network to the cell tower.

At the cell tower, packets from your phone are read by a special kind of computer called a router. Each router is like a post office: it reads each packet to check the address it’s trying to reach, then has to decide which computer to send it to next. The router is connected to other routers, which are in turn connected to other routers, and so on. The router’s job is to forward packets it receives to whichever router is the next closest to the packet’s destination.

But how can it know which one that is? To figure it out, the router uses a routing protocol, which works roughly like this:

The router asks each router it’s connected to if that router can reach 172.66.0.227. Each of those routers repeats this step, forwarding the request to all the other routers it is connected to, and so on. This search ripples out through the internet until some router answers “yes,” it can connect to the computer with that address. Then all the devices in the chain each report back that they found the destination, and how many “hops” it took them to get there. The first router then sends the packets to whichever connected device says it needed the fewest “hops” to get there. That continues for hop after hop, until dozens of routers have passed your message all the way from your computer to the computer that’s listening at the address 172.66.0.227.

Note that those packets are traveling through physical cables that are stretched across every continent, and in between continents via vast submarine cables that span the world’s oceans!

Now that the routers have found the path from your phone to the computer with the address 172.66.0.226, the two can send and receive packets. But, things can happen, and the packets can get mixed up or arrive out of order. To deal with that, the two computers use Transmission Control Protocol (TCP), which (basically) lets the two computers number the packets so they can be put in the right order if they got mixed up in transmission, or re-send any packets that got lost.

Now data is flowing across the network, but there’s one more problem. All of this data is plain text, and all the computers in between your phone and the other computer can read all the messages you’re sending back and forth. Maybe that’s fine for some content, but it’s definitely not fine if you’re using a banking app! To keep the data private, the computers use Transport Layer Security (TLS) to encrypt the connection. This is possible thanks to public key cryptography, which is now the third amazing technology that I’ll skip over, except to say that it guarantees the data flowing between the two computers can only be read by them, and not the many intermediate devices that pass that data along.

Finally, at the end of all of this, your phone can load that viral tweet.

All that accumulated progress, and I haven’t even talked about the operating systems, the computer hardware (and its vast industrial supply chain), the telecommunications infrastructure, and the electrical grid itself, all of which are necessary for you to read a tweet. So once in a while, when you load something on the web, think for a moment about how great civilization is, that we can produce systems so powerful and reliable that we take them for granted.

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!

Thanks to Sam Enright for his feedback. And if you’d like an even deeper dive on how the Internet works, try the Mozilla Developer Network’s guide.

If you follow via email or the Substack app, you don’t need to do anything to continue following. If you want to look up the newsletter on the web, you can now find it at www.freerange.city.

Today’s post covers why I made this change, and how what I’m writing about will broaden a bit.

When I started this newsletter in April 2024 I only had one goal: start writing consistently again.

My experience is that writing is a powerful way to open doors. From 2008-2012 I blogged regularly, and that writing helped me connect with local advocates and form the Houston Chapter of the Congress for the New Urbanism. That in turn connected me to the CNU Next-Gen, where I met Chuck Marohn and joined his work to transform Strong Towns from a blog to a national movement.

Writing increases your “surface area for luck,” and I’ve reached a stage of life where I’d like to do that again. But writing isn’t an easy habit to build. It takes a long time to even figure out what you want to say, let alone to wrangle your thoughts into a coherent essay.

So my only goal was to write at least once a month. I did nothing to promote the newsletter; actually, I knew that I would inevitably write some low quality essays in the process of rebuilding my mental muscle, and I embraced not having an audience as a liberating opportunity to just force myself to publish something. And I didn’t think very hard about what to call it, or how to describe it.

Now that I’m ~18 months in, I’ve mostly gotten my writing muscle back. Doors have started opening doors again. I’ve been meeting other writers through the community on Substack, and I had the chance to participate in the Roots of Progress writing fellowship, which connected me to the Progress community. About 1,500 people have subscribed to follow along (wow!). But as this newsletter has gotten established, I’ve realized that the name I started with doesn’t fit very well.

Initially I figured I’d mostly write about what comes after today’s conventional suburban development pattern, so I called the newsletter “The Post-Suburban Future.” Then, I couple months ago I found myself thinking about the jargon we “urbanists” use, and how it can cause us to talk past each other.

Unfortunately, for many people “suburban” and “urban” mean roughly “good” and “bad.” Which one you think is “good” and “bad” have a lot to do with your age, where you live, and your personal politics. But because the majority of Americans live in the suburbs, more people think of “urban” as “bad” and “suburban” as “good.”

While it’s linguistically difficult, I concluded that it would be better to minimize use of the words “urban” and “suburban.” But I’m violating that rule right in the title of my newsletter🤦‍♂️. Since then I’ve been thinking about what I might like to call this instead.

I wrote a personal essay a few weeks back, “The Free Range City,” and the title has stuck with me. I think it’s a better description of what I care about.

What personally animates me the most is freedom. That includes freedom to build housing, and freedom to create more beautiful places than today’s rules allow. But most all, it means freedom for families. I want my kids to live a high-autonomy life, to be able to explore the world around them safely on foot.

Free-Ranging has become a widely known concept in agriculture: basically what you’d think farming is like, with animals roaming a pasture instead of being confined to cages indoors. We intuitively grasp why it’s more humane for animals to graze outside — yet fail to notice how we’ve placed ourselves in the equivalent of industrial farming environments.

Most Americans live inside self-contained boxes, which they leave by going into their airlock, boarding their transporter pod, then traveling through uninhabitable infrastructure to get to another self-contained box. We live more like packets on the internet than people in a place. We don’t routinely experience the most basic human activity, walking around and exploring the world around us, serendipitously bumping into friends and neighbors along the way. It isn’t good for us!

This change in the way we live has been especially limiting for children. The decline in childrens’ autonomy was most poignantly captured in an article by David Derbyshire, which featured this map:

Over the last few generations our children’s freedom to roam and explore has shrunk to nearly nothing. It isn’t good for them!

Kids should be free to go to their friends houses, to play at the park, to walk to school, to live in their neighborhood, without needing an adult to drive them everywhere.

My passion is to help us rediscover and rebuild our natural human habitat: villages, towns, and cities, that people can roam through and between, without depending on mechanical intervention. Cars, busses, trains, etc. are all wonderful inventions, and of course we should continue to use them. Micromobility and autonomy will make these technologies better than ever! But mobility machines are tools we should use when we need them, not artificial life support we can’t function without.

There’s a final element of “Free Range” that I like as a more thoughtful title for this newsletter. While I’ll mostly continue writing about the past, present, and future of cities, I also want to incorporate some thoughts on parenting and family life, and on societal progress and the Progress movement. And I like the idea of the newsletter having a broader, less constrained title to match.

So, today the newsletter gets a new name, and a slightly broadened theme. Welcome to Free Range City!

The 19th century philosophy of progress was naive. But the 20th century turn away from progress was no solution.

We need a new philosophy of progress for the 21st century. One that teaches people not to take the modern world for granted. One that acknowledges the problems of progress, confronts them directly, and offers solutions. And one that holds up a positive vision of the future.

The conference gathered about 350 people for four days to think about the challenges we’re facing today and how we might solve them. It was small enough for easy introductions and rich discussions, but large enough to represent a range of perspectives and backgrounds. I was excited to attend the conference, and it exceeded my expectations.

For an intellectual gathering in the Bay Area, I expected the tone to be what I remembered from living and working in San Francisco in the 2010’s. Well to the left of center, with a universal assumption that everyone present must be a “progressive” and partisan Democrat. Anxious about perceived existential threats. Eager to signal virtue, and afraid to offend.

Instead I found something more interesting and more difficult to describe. The discussions were unassuming, civil, and largely apolitical. The lack of performative virtue signaling was notable, and even the subject of occasional jokes. The event was family-friendly, with childcare provided throughout — something I’ve never seen at a conference before — yet I don’t think I’d call it “pro-natal;” the issue was not front and center. It felt like a bunch of people just being normal, sharing an unspoken agreement that there’s some version of “a good life” that the vast majority of us wanted to take part in. Perhaps “Pragmatic Optimism” is the best label I can give.1

Among the people I spoke with, I heard a generally shared understanding that:

• The mid-century high modernists (aka technocrats) greatly damaged our culture of progress by imposing orderly but dumb systems from the top down, and abusing power along the way.

• The reactionary responses of vetocracy and de-growth stopped the abuse of power by locking in the status quo, but don’t offer solutions to today’s problems.

• We need to restore a culture of dynamism and innovation, and find a new way forward.

The conference consisted of lively debate and discussion on how, exactly, we should restore dynamism, and what the way forward looks like. I heard challenging opinions shared constructively, and perceived a genuine openness to ideas that I haven’t often experienced in other venues.

The conference sessions focused heavily on the future, and in particular on coming changes in technology, policy, and society. A few themes that stood out to me:

• The amount and diversity of energy technology being developed right now surprised me. From things as “futuristic” as modular nuclear reactors to the creative mundanity of using dirt as batteries, there was just a lot more going on than I realized. While some of the discussion was about how we legalize massive transmissions projects again, a lot of it centered on scaling and deploying less centralized technologies. I came away feeling more optimistic about the next generation of the energy industry.

• In my opinion, Autonomy continues to be the most under-recognized technology of the decade. During the conference I got to tour the Zipline factory in South SF, and afterward I rode in a Waymo for the first time. is doing the best work to try and prepare us all for what’s coming, but it seems that few people have internalized that driving is effectively optional now, or that a large share of deliveries in the future will be made by aerial drones. I think this will substantially change the economics of transportation, which presents an opportunity to make our cities work better.

• At the conference I learned more about California Forever via a session with the developer. Candidly, I went in expecting to be disappointed. Instead I was delighted by the project’s dense, walkable, human-scale design, and its approach of creating a permissive platform to be built up by many hands. To get a better sense of the project, I recommend Aaron Lubeck’s description of the design, and ’s more general description of the approach. I don’t know about the financing or infrastructure phasing, so I can’t speak to those aspects, but after seeing the vision I’m rooting for its success.

Two takeaways that I might write about more in the future:

First, I loved Charles Mann and Virginia Postrel’s session on “How the System Works,” in which they discussed how the systems we depend on for food, water, power, and public health were built up over time, and how much ongoing effort is required to maintain them. Strong Towns is deeply focused on the importance of maintenance, so it’s no surprise this talk spoke to me. That kind of work is not widely celebrated, or even well-known, but it should be!

While there was some discussion of labor and education at the conference, I think there should be more. Mann could have been a keynote speaker, perhaps interviewed by , connecting his story of the importance of our foundational civil infrastructure, and the critical operations and maintenance work it requires, with her work on building and maintaining the skilled workforce society needs to do it. The future has to be exciting to more than just the engineers and policy wonks. Centering the value and importance of skilled trades to the positive vision of the future is an opportunity to make the “Progress” narrative more broadly inclusive and compelling.

Second, in the weeks since the conference I’ve been thinking a lot about the aesthetics of “Progress.” It’s slightly ironic that the Roots of Progress speaks against the overreach of the mid-century high modernists, but embraces a retro-future aesthetic that directly emulates their visual style. I think this “works” because at this point that mid-century aesthetic is actually not avant-garde, but rather pays a nostalgic homage to the sentiments of an earlier time. In so doing it provides a continuity to the past in our time that it didn’t in its own.

I think that continuity with the past is actually an important element of the culture of Progress. Again, for the narrative to be broadly inclusive and compelling, people need to be able to see themselves living in and enjoying the positive vision of the future. The best vision of the future integrates the novel with the familiar, and perpetuates the most successful and beloved elements of our present, even as they continue to improve. To that end, I see an opportunity for the Progress movement to cross-pollinate with classical arts, architecture, and education movements. At first glance these ideas may seem to point in opposite directions, but I think their deeper goals values are actually quite similar.

A closing thought: as with all great conferences, the best part was the chance to meet and talk with so many interesting people. Thank you to everyone who attended for the incredible discussions! I’m grateful to the Roots of Progress for organizing the event, and for inviting me to join the writing fellowship and the conference. And most of all, I’m excited to discover a new and growing community of pragmatic optimists to collaborate with, and already looking forward to joining again next year.

At age nine, Zora had developed an intense interest in baking. Cooking shows had become her favorite screen time, especially Junior Bake Off. And while I’m a lousy cook and had not been much help in cultivating this hobby, my wife (who is a great cook!) had instructed her to self-sufficiency by this point.

I asked why she wanted to do a bake sale, although I was pretty sure I already knew the answer.

“It’s so fun!” She said. “But mom doesn’t want us to eat too many cookies… so, I thought… maybe I could sell them and boost my allowance!”

“Well, what’s your business plan?” I asked.

“Business plan?”

“How do you plan to sell the cookies?”

“Oh, I think I could sell them at the park.”

I nodded. Our neighborhood is a mix of houses and duplexes of various sizes, with a vibrant Main Street lined by shops and apartments running through the middle. The park occupies one block at the center of it all, and the edge of the park that touches the Main Street has been turned into a little plaza. Together these form a living room for the whole neighborhood, and were always busy. That would be a great place for a bake sale.

“And how much would you sell your cookies for?”

She frowned, as she clearly hadn’t considered this. “I don’t know… maybe a quarter, or, fifty cents… is that too much?”

“Fifty cents?” I shook my head. “You won’t make any money selling cookies for fifty cents!”

“Oh.” She slumped. “I guess it’s not a good idea.”

“I’m sure you could sell cookies for a dollar or more.”

“Really?” Her eyes lit up. “Will you help me?”

I said I would, but only if she was serious about it.

I lived in two very different places growing up.

When I was a boy, my family lived in rural Illinois. Scattered fields and farms surrounded our neighborhood, but mostly we were in the woods. Our subdivision held about fifty homes on a narrow asphalt loop, and no fences.

I roamed around our neighborhood, collecting and playing with every size and shape of stick. I discovered all the small places that only kids could fit, shared many of these as secret clubhouses to play with my sisters or the neighbor kids. I kept a few to myself. The loop street we lived on was too narrow for fast-moving traffic, and I loved racing my bike around it as fast as I could pedal.

I never had to ask to play outside. I was sometimes told to. But mostly I just set out whenever I felt like it and went wherever I wanted. I know now that cell phones existed in the 90s, but I hadn’t seen or heard of them at the time. My Dad could whistle very loudly — when he did, I knew it was time to come home.

Through age 12, my world felt wide open to explore. But opportunity in Illinois was limited, and before I started high school my family would move away.

Zora and I sat at the table together with a stack of paper to work through a business plan. I told her there were a few key questions to answer. How much did her cookies cost to make? She shrugged. I told her I’d loan her the startup capital she’d need, but she had to work out how much, and be sure she could pay it back.

We got out her cookie recipe, went through the ingredients, and looked up the price of each ingredient at the nearby Safeway. As it turned out, eggs were a bottleneck — her recipe just called for one egg per batch, but we’d need to buy twelve at a time. After concluding that funding twelve batches of a dozen cookies up front would be too much, we agreed she was allowed to have some left over “scrap material” that she could contribute back to the refrigerator. So the cost per cookie worked out to about twenty cents.

“So if you sell these for a quarter, you’ll earn five cents per cookie. How much will you earn selling a dozen cookies?”

She got to work, pencil scribbling furiously through the arithmetic. “Sixty cents. That’s pretty good!”

“Well,” I said. “How much time will you spend making them and selling them?”

She figured about an hour to make one batch, but we didn’t know how long it would take to sell, so assumed one hour to start.

“If you work for two hours and make sixty cents, how much is that per hour?”

“Thirty cents?”

“Minimum wage in Denver is about 18 dollars an hour,” I explained. Zora’s eyes went wide. “Nationally it’s $7.25. If you’re going to do a business, you need to aim to make at least minimum wage. I think you should aim for Denver rates, but, I’m not going to fund this unless you can show me that you’ll make at least the national minimum wage.”

“That’s so much money!” she exclaimed.

“What would you have to do to earn that much?”

“I guess… sell a lot more cookies,” she said.

“Or sell them for more money,” I added. “But there are too many unknowns right now. How many can you sell, and what’s the right price…”

I explained that we needed a way to figure out how much demand there was to estimate how many cookies she could sell per hour, and determine willingness to pay, so we’d need to do some market research.

“Market research?” she asked.

When I was 13 my family moved to the suburbs of Austin. To my parents, this was moving back home. To me, it was moving to an alien planet.

Although I was older, neither I nor my parents felt it was safe for me to go anywhere on my own. But even if we had, there was nowhere to go. Our house was surrounded by either vacant land or other houses (of the same size and price) in every direction. The closest non-residential use was a gas station a mile or so away, but you had to cross a four-lane highway to get to it. So I alternated between reading, playing video games, and feeling miserably bored, while my beloved bicycle collected dust.

A few years later a minor league baseball stadium opened up a few miles from our subdivision. This was an earth-shattering event. It put our town on the map. My Mom gave me a ride to a job fair hosted at the stadium, and I signed on to work in concessions. She drove me at first, because we both knew it would be short-term.

A few weeks later, I turned 16. I felt like I’d been waiting my whole life. My Granddad gave me some money to get a car, and my Dad suggested it should be a truck. I found an old F-150 for $2,850. I remember because it felt like a shocking amount of money to me at the time.

With a job and a car I was alive again.

I quit being a burger flipper (for $5.15 an hour!), and became a stadium vendor. I’d buy a big box of snacks at the commissary under the stands, then hustle my way up and down the aisles. “Get your peanuts, popcorn, cracker jacks here!” I earned 25 cents a sale — 50 cents if the customer let me keep the change. I learned to fumble around in my money pouch and ask if they wanted their quarter. I discovered that if I also wore the beverage backpack (“Ice-cold Coke and Water too!”) I’d sell more per trip through the stadium. I observed that nobody bought anything from vendors before first pitch, so I timed my commute to pull into the staff parking lot just as they were singing the national anthem. Sales dropped off a cliff at the seventh-inning stretch, so I decided that was when I’d head home. I earned about $100 a night working a two-hour shift. I was very proud of that — per hour, it was far more than either of my parents earned.

There was far more opportunity for adults in fast-growing Texas than there had been in sleepy Illinois. I just had to be able to drive everywhere to partake of it.

Mid-morning on a Saturday, Zora started the baking process. First, she set the oven to pre-heat, then greased a pan.

“Hey Mom,” she asked, “can you get down the flour?” We keep that high in the pantry, and Zora is pretty short.

Once she had the ingredients out on the kitchen counter, Zora grabbed a large, glass bowl. She dumped the butter and sugar in the bowl and started to mix with a fork. “You know it’s right when it looks fluffy,” she said.

Next, she added the eggs and vanilla, plus an extra pinch of sugar. “That’s my secret ingredient. Don’t tell!”

Then it’s time for the flour, baking powder, and salt. These she stirs with a teal spatula until it’s all well-mixed.

“Now the chocolate chips,” she said. “You just put in as many as you want. Mom says a quarter cup but, some people like more and some people like less. I say just have fun with it.”

She set the mixing bowl down and picked up a cupcake scooper — it’s a shiny metal tool that looks a bit like an ice-cream scoop crossed with a grip-strengthener. When you squeeze the handles, a metal band slides behind the scoop and ejects the ball of dough.

She put the baking sheets in the oven. After 12 minutes, it was time to take them out and let them cool for another ten. She finished cleaning up while she waited.

“Okay, Dad, it’s time!” She used the spatula to scoop the fresh cookies into a clear plastic bin. Once that was sealed, she grabbed a stack of napkins and her notebook. I picked up our tiny folding table, and we set off for the park.

In college, I studied Architecture. I’d always been interested in cities, and had an idea that I’d like to work on building them. The program required students to study abroad, so in my Junior year I went to Italy. What I found there surprised me.

I expected the old, beautiful buildings. I didn’t expect the sense of freedom I’d last felt as a kid in the countryside. In Castiglion Fiorentino, I watched kids roaming the cobblestone streets, popping in and out of their friends’ houses. I saw them active in the social life of the neighborhood in a way I’d forgotten about. And that social life extended to all ages, something I hadn’t thought of as a child. I saw little old ladies carrying their groceries up and down steep hills, stopping to chat with neighbors they passed along the way, seemingly unburdened by the large sacks they carried. It shocked me. Back home, I would expect people of that age to be relying on handicapped parking and assistance to and from their seats.

I experienced a new kind of freedom myself, traveling with friends on weekends, hopping from city to city by train and exploring on foot. To my surprise, I felt more mobile without a car in a place where they were optional than I had with a car in the country that prioritized them above all else.

I discovered that academics call this experience “urbanism,” and I fell in love with it. Freedom to roam and explore, combined with social life and economic opportunity. A free-range city life.

There was just one problem: this wasn’t my home.

The bright August sun baked the sidewalk, but the shade of the giant trees lining the park felt cool and comfortable. We set up the table and her supplies. Next to the table, I leaned on the half-wall separating the plaza area from the playground behind it, “supervising” from a short distance, but really just enjoying the show.

Zora buzzed through the plaza for an hour, introducing herself and offering cookies in exchange for questions. It wasn’t a particularly busy day, but the steady flow of people passing through meant she’d hardly idled.

“Hi, I’m Zora, would you like to try a free cookie?”

The man she stopped was lean and sharply dressed, with a few strands of gray through dark brown hair. He looked down to see a tiny, smiling, girl extending her bin of cookies and napkins his direction. A dusting of crumbs revealed the bin had recently been full, but now only a few cookies remained.

“I’d love one!” He said, taking a napkin, then picking a cookie from the bin. “Thank you.”

“I’m doing market research. Can I ask you a few questions?”

“Market research!” he said with a grin, followed by an amused glance my direction. I smiled and nodded. A young couple walking their dog happened to be passing by, the two shared an amused chuckle at the scene as they carried on their way.

“Why of course,” the man said, turning back to Zora. “Ask away!”

She hurried to her table to swap her cookie bin and napkins for a notebook. “Okay! What’s your name?”

“I’m Ben,” he said. “Nice to meet you.”

“Thanks,” she said. “And, what’s your favorite cookie flavor?”

He thought as he took a bite. “I’d say chocolate chip. But I also like snickerdoodle.”

“Oh, these are chocolate chip!”

“And very good!” Ben agreed with a nod. “You know, I like your recipe. The cookie is sweet but not too sweet, and it has a light and airy texture. Did you make these yourself?”

“Yep!” Zora nodded.

“Very impressive.”

“Thank you!” She said. “Um, what price do you think I should sell these for?”

“Hmm,” he considered. “For cookies this good, I think three dollars would be fair.”

“Oh, good!” She carefully recorded his answer. “Last question, should I have a tip jar?”

“A tip jar?” Ben laughed, looked up and gave me a bit of a wink, then turned back to Zora with a smile. “Yes, I think you should definitely have a tip jar. I think you’d get a lot of tips.”

We don’t have free-range cities in the United States, and especially not in Texas. So, when I came home, my life goal became to build one. Maybe not a true city, but a large-scale development. I wanted to create a pedestrian-first town, where people of all ages and abilities could live life to the fullest, whether or not they could drive. Where there was a civic space at the center of every neighborhood that acted as the living room. Where kids could roam and explore and then go get a gallon of milk from the store because Dad forgot to. As a new graduate I was certain I’d be able to figure out the real estate business and build myself a place to live in time to raise my kids there.

Life didn’t work out that way.

A few years later I was married, and it had become obvious that my big dream was out of reach. Fortunately, my wife had also caught the “urbanism” bug, so we decided we’d aim for the next best thing: find the most walkable neighborhood we could live in. This proved to be a big challenge.

We spent 16 years searching for the best combination of work and place. We followed jobs from Texas to North Carolina and California before we found our way to Colorado. We managed to live in walkable neighborhoods in some of our stops, usually by renting small, old apartments. From each home base, we explored the surrounding region as much as we could. We took advantage of forced-remote during COVID to spend months living on the road, always scouting. Walkable neighborhoods are rare. But more than that, they’re expensive.

We spent those 16 years working hard and saving up, stressed as house prices always kept climbing, the economic goalposts ever-moving. I walked away from my career in urban design to work in software instead, in hopes that a few years of high earnings would make things easy. Instead, it was just enough to make things possible. We decided early on that we wouldn’t let finances alone determine when and how many kids we’d have, and I’m glad we didn’t. We would have waited too long. Instead we had our kids along the way.

Last year we bought a house in a safe, vibrant, walkable neighborhood. Although at just under 1,500 square feet, we made a tradeoff to afford it that many families wouldn’t.

I feel like we barely made it. It shouldn’t be this hard.

Zora gave out her test batch of 24 cookies in less than ninety minutes. We gathered our things and folded up the display table, then walked back to the house.

When we got home, we spread out several sheets of paper on the kitchen table and tallied up the responses. We calculated both the mean and median willingness to pay, and I made sure Zora understood the difference. As a fourth grader, this was a decent amount of extra math homework, but I don’t think she noticed.

“Well,” she considered. “One person said fifty cents, but everyone else said a dollar or more, so, we could sell them for a dollar.”

“Maybe,” I said, “but look a little closer. You’re right, those lower numbers pull the average down. But lots of people said higher prices. One person said five dollars!”

“Yeah, that was Sophia, the blond lady with her friends,” Zora said. The three young women had showered praise on Zora for her entrepreneurial spirit and all said they’d pay a premium.

We discussed the different customer profiles, that young women had been Zora’s most enthusiastic supporters, while older men and a few couples had also shown high willingness to pay. Older women walking alone had been kind, but mostly suggested very low prices. Younger men were the most likely to say “no, thanks” to the cookies.

We then worked through a few scenarios — if she sold the cookies for a dollar she’d earn 80 cents each, or $9.60 per dozen, but if she sold them for five dollars apiece she’d earn $57.60.

“Oh wow,” Zora said. “Maybe I should sell for five!”

“But only one person said they’d pay that much,” I pointed out. “So if we sold for $5 how long do you think it would take to sell a dozen?”

“Oh, probably a long time.”

“Let’s look back at our mean and median,” I said. “We found a mean price of $2.50, but a median of $3.00. About half the people we asked said they’d pay three, about half said one or two, and just a few people said more. If your goal is to maximize your earnings per hour, what should you do?”

Zora considered this for a bit, then said, “I guess the price should be somewhere in the middle so I can, like, sell out quickly but, not for too cheap.”

“Great idea,” I said. And after a bit more discussion we arrived at a strategy: One cookie for $3, or two for $5.

As a father of four, I’ve been blessed to see how much kids are capable of. My kids have learned how to walk to school and to church. They’ve learned how to ride the bus, and how to go to the library and check out books. They go visit friends in the neighborhood on their own, roaming from house to house. We’ve avoided “intensive parenting,” and instead prioritized giving the kids space to explore, and the invitation to come with us as we live daily life.

So much of our children’s ability to grow independently comes from the form of our neighborhood. Most families in North America don’t get to live in neighborhoods like this; they live in subdivisions like the one I lived in as a teenager in Texas. Parents have to choose between countless hours of chauffeur duty, or trying to keep restless kids stuck at home from living on screens. They don’t get to see their children freely explore the world around them because they have to raise them in an environment that isn’t safe or practical for kids. It wasn’t designed for them.

When we moved here, my son (our youngest) was six months old. By the time he turned two, he knew the way from our house to the playground three blocks away. He would ask to go, then confidently lead me there without ever getting lost. My job on that walk was to make sure he didn’t get run over. This is as close to free-range as we could get.

Today I have different decisions to make. Do I still want to develop a truly pedestrian-centric neighborhood of my own design? Could I do that in time for my grandchildren to grow up there? Or should I give up that dream forever, and focus only on improving the place we live now. It’s close to perfect, if we could make the streets safe and stop prices climbing.

Now my son is three. One of his favorite activities is to help me get groceries — but only if we bike there. From his seat on the back of the bike, he tells me where to turn, and shouts hello and waves to the neighbors we pass.

This will be the only home he knows growing up, and I hope he’ll know every inch of it the way I knew the yards and bushes and trees of my childhood home in Illinois. That he’ll have secret hiding places he shares with his best friend, and a few he keeps just for himself.

And for each of my children, I hope they’ll have the chance to stay, if they want to. I’m confident that Denver’s job market will have plenty of opportunity for them to pick from. I’m less confident that we’ll fix housing affordability in time. Maybe building a new neighborhood they can each afford will be our family business.

The next weekend, Zora baked another batch of two dozen cookies. She carried her table to the park, and a chalkboard sign advertising her prices. This time my wife sat nearby to supervise, and to take payment via Venmo.

The tip jar had been great advice, while I was not surprised that people wanted to offer some extra encouragement to a young entrepreneur, the level of generosity was more than I expected. One kindly, silver-haired man quietly thanked Zora for the cookie, then leaned forward and presented her a crisp twenty dollar bill. “Keep the change,” he said with a smile.

She sold out in under two hours, earning $65 in sales, and nearly $50 in tips. After the $4.80 in material costs, Zora earned $108 for three and a half hours of total work, or $36 an hour.

“I earned enough for Denver!” she exclaimed.

I told her I was proud of her.

And I hope, that if I do my best, she’ll be able to say that as an adult.

Zora’s Cookie Recipe

Ingredients:

• 1 soft stick of butter.

• ¼ cup brown sugar.

• ¼ cup white sugar.

• 1 egg.

• ½ tsp vanilla.

• 1½ cups of flour.

• ½ tsp baking soda.

• ¼ tsp salt.

• ¼–½ cup of chocolate chips (depending on your preference).

Directions:

1. Cream together butter and sugars.

2. Mix in the egg and vanilla.

3. Pour in the flour, baking soda, and salt; then mix well.

4. Mix in the chocolate chips.

5. Space cookie dough balls on greased or parchment paper-lined baking sheet.

   • For big cookies, use 1/4 cup scoops.

   • For small cookies, use 1 tbsp scoops.

6. Pre-heat oven to 350.

   • For big cookies, bake 11–13 minutes.

   • For small cookies, bake 9–11 minutes.

7. Enjoy!

Thank you to Emma McAleavy and Mike Riggs at the Roots of Progress for encouraging me to write a “personal” essay. And to Pam and Zora Burleson for proof-reading, and fact checking, this one.

But there’s a deeper problem in our cities that no one-time change to the rules can fix. Land use regulation is based on a paradigm of stasis: the rules prescribe what can be built on a lot now and forever. Cities can go through all the difficult technical and political work of rewriting the rulebook every generation, but the longer it’s been since the last comprehensive reform, the more that the rules that made sense in the past work against the interests of the present.

To build anything other than the prescriptions of the past, individual projects must go through lengthy and uncertain approval processes. Rezoning takes months or even years, but developers don’t earn money on a project until they sell or lease it at the end, so this time is very costly. And if a developer spends 12 months working on a rezoning and it fails, they’re right back where they started, minus a year of unpaid work. This is too much of a deterrent for most neighborhood-friendly incremental projects to overcome.

Cities should care about managing change; residents who worry about their neighborhoods changing too much, or too quickly, have valid concerns! But, ironically, today’s paradigm of stasis, and its time-consuming discretionary review, pushes developers toward large-scale projects instead. The system gives us periods of little change, punctuated by dramatic change all at once.

But what if we changed the paradigm to intentionally allow housing and development to evolve gradually in response to market demand over time? After all, we don’t need high-rises to close the housing gap. As I previously explored, Denver could solve its housing shortage for twenty years just by adding one backyard cottage per block each year.

I believe we could take a different approach that would expand housing in the places people want to live without radically changing neighborhoods. I call this approach “Adaptive Code.”

An Adaptive Code has two key features:

• Instead of what’s allowed being determined by city planners drawing a map, what’s allowed is determined by surrounding conditions.2

• Instead of assuming that every place should stay frozen as-is, assume that every place should gradually mature over time.

I explained the core concept in my introductory post a few months ago. Today let’s return to the real-world example of development in Denver that I’ve been exploring in the last two posts, and see how Adaptive Code would improve the outcome.

A simplified Adaptive Code for Denver

Denver’s zoning code already has great building blocks we can use to imagine an Adaptive Code.3 It specifies a variety of building types that developers can build, with design criteria the buildings need to meet. The code implies a general pattern, where smaller building types are allowed in lower density zones, and larger building types are allowed in higher density zones.

We could take these building types and explicitly organize them into a sequence of increasing levels of development (also known as a Transect).4 For example, we could say that houses are allowed to redevelop into duplexes or tandem homes, which in turn are allowed to redevelop into row homes. Each step in this sequence is one “level” of development.

Instead of distinct commercial zones, we’d allow scale-appropriate mixed-use throughout the city. In other words, commercial activity would gradually increase alongside the level of residential development, so the lowest level of development is limited to home offices, while the next level allows corner stores, and the next allows coffee shops and restaurants, etc.

Put all that together and we end up with something like this as the core of our development code:5

To understand what’s allowed on each property, we’d classify it by its current level of development. Then, on each lot, the property owner would be allowed to build according to the rules for that level of development, just like it works in Denver today. But there would be one big difference: the code would include criteria for succession by right.

• “Succession” means a property could be increased from it’s current level of development to the next level up.

• “By right” means that no hearing or other discretionary approval would be required.

Adaptive Code is contextual; so the criteria for succession must take the surrounding conditions into consideration. We can use Denver’s existing front setback rule as a precedent:

In Denver’s zoning code (§13.1.5.9) there’s a unique rule for determining the front setback of a property: look at the two buildings on either side of your lot and match whichever one is closer to the street. Some conditions and exceptions apply, so it’s not always that simple, but in most cases this is the rule.

Borrowing that idea, the succession formula could be: if the lots on both sides of a particular property are L1, that property can be increased to L2 (and so on for any given level of development).

A concrete example

To see this approach play out in practice, let’s revisit the scenario we explored in the last two posts. Briefly recapping:

In the first post, I walked through a concrete example using a vacant lot at 3601 Grape Street in Denver. The goal was to build new homes for $400k or less (affordable for Denver’s median income). I concluded that it was possible if we could build four homes on the lot.

In the second post, I looked in more detail the “Two Unit” zoning on the Grape Street lot, and how the it prevents us from building more affordable new homes.

But Denver has a set of rules that would allow more affordable homes to be built: the “Row House” zone. Today we’d have to go through a lengthy rezoning process to build row homes on Grape Street, but what if Denver took the Adaptive Code approach described above?

To start, let’s take a quick look at the surrounding context. If you explore the neighborhood around the Grape Street lot, here’s what you’ll find.

The majority of the neighborhood is a mix of houses and duplexes that look like they were all built around 1950. But there’s a large variety of other building types on the surrounding blocks, including light industrial, commercial, and small apartments.

If you look at the frontage on 36th street, it’s obvious that modest row houses would fit in just fine with the diverse mix of buildings that already surround this lot.

In our example Adaptive Code, duplexes are considered “Level 2” development, and row homes are “Level 3” development. Since the Grape Street lot is surrounded by duplexes on all sides, it would be allowed to increase from “Level 2” to “Level 3” by right, meaning we could step up from duplex to Denver’s “Row House” building type.

The result is a set of four, new, affordable row homes.6

As an aside, I hadn’t seen many tiny, one-story row homes like this before I moved to Denver, but the city has a lot of them.

Alternatively, if you prefer (or think the neighborhood would prefer) two story homes with more back yard, we could use a design like this:

There are many other variations that could work, including the four-plex option we considered in the last post, so don’t anchor too much on the design. The key is, under Adaptive Code we’d be allowed to step up to the next increment of development by right. That would make it much easier to bring affordable houses to market without radically changing the neighborhood.

What are we preserving?

The purpose of zooming in on a specific case like this has been to make a lot of the abstract ideas I talk about concrete. The fate of a single random lot in Denver may not matter much, but it demonstrates the paradigm that’s determining the fate of nearly every municipal parcel in the United States.

Today’s regulatory paradigm is to build to a finished state, then prevent change. The assumption is that the presence of a non-homogenous building within any zone is an “encroachment” and “incompatible,” despite the most beloved and vibrant areas of our cities and towns being characterized by a heterogeneous mix of buildings and uses. But this attempt to “preserve” neighborhoods ends up undermining them instead.

We can already see this process unfolding near the Grape Street lot, as homes are starting to be flipped.

Now, there’s nothing wrong with upgrading a home! But we have to understand, these homes are being flipped because there’s significant demand from higher wealth people to move into this general area. Because we haven’t made space for them in the higher-wealth areas, they have to find an alternative. Many of them decide to move into lower-wealth neighborhoods nearby. And because we’re not adding many homes there either, higher-wealth people can only move in by displacing the lower-wealth people who live there now.

If the city continues trying to preserve the buildings in their current form, the most likely outcome is that the existing residents will be gradually displaced as wealthier people move into the mostly fixed supply of homes and upgrade them. We have not preserved “the character of the neighborhood” if all the current residents are displaced.

It’s time for a new paradigm

Cities can and should try to reform the specific rules that limit new housing, including parking mandates and minimum lot sizes. But as long as we continue operating within a paradigm of centrally-planned stasis, we won’t address the root cause of our problems.

To improve housing affordability and reduce displacement, we have to let neighborhoods mature and add new homes where they’re needed. Existing residents don’t want to experience radical change, nor should they. But spending months reviewing each change on a lot by lot basis won’t work; nor will restricting change to just a few sacrificial neighborhoods.

We need a new paradigm that embraces change while being responsive to the challenges it brings. Adaptive Code is my vision for how to achieve it.

Epilogue

Today’s example uses the building blocks of Denver’s existing code to make a hypothetical Adaptive Code for the city. In practice, Adaptive Codes would look different in different places.

Each community would need to make two critical decisions:

1. What are the appropriate levels of development for our community, where stepping up from one level to the next represents healthy maturation of the neighborhood?

2. What formula should we use to determine when a lot should be allowed to take that next step?

The critical point is that the community is deciding how it should evolve deterministically, by right; not whether it will evolve on a discretionary, project-by-project basis.

Adaptive Code is novel, and cities that move this direction will have to iterate. The succession formula will encounter edge cases to work out. The steps up in development have to pencil for developers; finding the right levels may take multiple attempts. There will also be special cases, like the land around high-capacity transit stations, where we might want to intentionally take larger steps up. What other considerations can you think of? I’d love to hear your ideas in the comments.

Working this out won’t be trivial, but if we got it right, we’d unlock incremental development, which is the best and fastest path to solving the shelter problem, without depending on subsidies or inflicting radical change and displacement. And maybe, just maybe, we’d end up with land use rules that work better for everyone.

Thank you to Mike Riggs, Étienne Fortier-Dubois, Colleen Smith, and Pam Burleson for their feedback on drafts!

More than 50% of Denver voters can’t afford to live in Denver today. Families who have been here for generations are being pushed out, as well as the teachers, nurses, and first responders who serve our city. Over the last decade, the cost of housing has exploded for both renters and buyers: the average cost of a home is nearly a million dollars, and the average rent for a two-bedroom apartment is $2,250. Nearly 50,000 households pay over half their income to rent. We need sweeping, ambitious change to put Denver back on track.

After taking office, Johnston championed a sales tax increase to raise $100M to build affordable housing, saying “If this does not pass, we’re probably looking at 25,000 families being displaced from Denver over the next decade.” But the tax increase didn’t pass.

“The voters said we don’t want to invest more,” Johnston reflected this summer. “We said, we’ve got to find more ways to do it without that investment.” The Mayor is now promoting for a tax rebate for developers who build lower priced units.

But what if I told you the city could unlock thousands of units of affordable housing, for free, by changing a few words on paper?

In the last post I modeled development on a real site in Denver, and asked what it would take to build an affordable house. The modeled showed why it’s challenging, but also that we could do it — except that Denver’s land use regulations don’t allow it.

Today I’ll walk through those regulatory barriers in more detail:

• First I’ll take the model from the last post and show two different design options for how it could be built

• Then I’ll walk through the major regulatory barriers that stands in the way, and show how they prohibit the design of the project.

This is a real world example in Denver, which means I’m looking specifically at Denver’s zoning code. But Denver employs most of the common regulatory barriers to affordable housing, so the takeaways from Denver generalize broadly.

An affordable design

First, a quick recap of the development model:

• To be affordable for a person earning Denver’s median income, a newly built home must sell for $400k or less.

• We’re modeling a specific, typical lot in Denver: 3601 Grape St.

• Given the high land price in Denver, and the high cost of new construction, the model shows that the best way to achieve our target price is to build four 800 sqft, two bedroom units on the lot.

Throughout this post I’ll continue to refer back to this model — so if you want to see where all the numbers come from you might want to read that post first.

To come up with a design we start with the lot we have to work with:

The lot is on the corner of 36th and Grape Street. This is a very common lot type in Denver. As it’s currently oriented toward Grape Street (on the right), we would say the lot is 50’ wide and 125’ deep, with an alley in the back. But, as a corner lot, we could also think of it as 125’ wide and 50’ deep, with an alley on the side.

Setting the development rules aside and focusing on affordability, I think there are two obvious options to fit four homes on the lot.1

Program 1 — Rental four-plex

The first program is to build a four-plex, made to look like a large house facing Grape Street, with the interior divided into four apartments. Each apartment would be an 800 sqft, 2 bedroom unit.

We could sell these as condos, but it’s more complicated and less popular with buyers, so this design would probably work better as a rental property. But given the cost of the project, the rent should still come out below our target of $2453/mo.

Program 2 — For-sale starter homes

The second program would be to sell four small starter homes. We can take advantage of the fact the lot is on a corner and build 800 sqft cottages facing East 36th Avenue. To make this work, each cottage would get a 25’ x 50’ lot, and we’d have a shared 25’ x 50’ parking area next to the alley.

Denver has thousands of small historic homes on narrow lots like this, so these would be in-character for the city. One difference, the historic homes are usually on lots that are 100-125’ deep, giving a back yard behind the house. Given today’s high land prices, we can’t offer a big back yard within our budget, so these homes would instead have space for a small garden.

Regulatory barriers

I previewed in the last post that Denver’s code won’t allow us to build either of the programs we’re interested in. To understand that, let’s walk through the five most common regulatory barriers one by one and see how they affect our building plan.

The Grape Street lot is zoned E-TU-B, which in Denver’s system means residential use, allowing up to two units, with a minimum lot size of 4,500 sqft. Denver has an additional wrinkle that many of the requirements also vary depending on the building type. Rather than go into this in great detail, I’ll use the rules for the “Duplex” building type as the closest match to the designs we’re interested in.2

Working through the zoning code, we’ll see that Denver has all but one of the most common barriers that prevent more affordable housing from being built.

(1) Unit Count

The first and most straightforward barrier is the unit count restriction. Unit count limitations explicitly cap the number of dwelling units allowed on a property regardless of lot size or building size, often restricting properties to single-family homes or duplexes, specifically to prevent the construction of multi-family housing.

Our starter homes concept features one unit per lot, so it doesn’t run into this barrier, but the lot is limited to “two unit” housing, so our four-plex program is ruled out.

Perhaps we could split the lot in half and try for two duplexes?

(2) Minimum Lot Size

The next problem we run into is that the minimum lot size in this district is 4,500 sqft. We have 6,250 sqft, which isn’t enough to split in half. This requirement rules out both programs.

But suppose Denver lowered the minimum lot size to 3,000 sqft? That would still rule out the starter homes, but it would let us split the lot in half and build two duplexes. If Denver was more ambitious, it could lower the minimum lot size the 1,250 sqft, which would allow the starter home program.

As it is, the rules have already eliminated both of our design concepts. But what if we waived the unit count and lot size requirements, what barriers would we hit next?

(3) Minimum Lot Width

While 15’-25’ wide lots are very common in historic neighborhoods, many cities today require a minimum of 50’ width. Denver requires lots to be a minimum of 35’ wide in this zone. This wouldn’t interfere with the Four-Plex design, but it would rule out the 25’ wide lots we’d need for the Starter Homes.

Well, what if we got rid of the minimum lot width as well?

(4) Setbacks and Maximum Lot Coverage

Most zoning codes require “setback” distances: space that buildings must be kept back from the front, sides, and rear of the lot, as well as lot coverage maximums.

On the Grape St. lot the front and rear setbacks are 20’.3 The side setbacks and lot coverage requirements are based on the lot width: the Starter Homes would require a 3’ side setback and a maximum lot coverage of 60%, the Four-Plex would require a 5’ side setback and allow a maximum lot coverage of 45%.

For the starter homes, after taking out the 20’ front setback, a 3’ side setback, a 20’ setback, we’d have a buildable area of 19’x10’, too small to be useful.

But even if there were no setback requirements, our design specifies an 800 sqft house on a 1250 sqft lot — that’s 64% coverage. We’d have to shrink the houses to 750 sqft to comply with the 60% lot coverage requirement, or redesign them as two-story homes with smaller footprints.

The Four-Plex design fits within the 20’ front and rear setbacks and the 5’ side setbacks and covers 1,850 sqft, or 29.5% of the 6,250 sqft lot.

(5) Parking

Since we’ve just illustrated all the ways Denver’s rules are blocking more affordable housing, it’s worth highlighting one common barrier Denver recently removed: the city dropped its parking mandates this summer.4

Many cities require two spaces per home, which would mean 8 spaces for these designs. That requirement would rule out the Starter Home concept, and would make the Four Plex very difficult.5 Removing parking mandates was an important step for Denver to improve the viability of housing on smaller lots.

Cities get what they require

Walking through this example becomes a little bit absurd because we considered the various regulatory requirements one by one, when in reality they’re part of a bundle designed to go together and reinforce each other.

At 3601 Grape Street, the city has mandated a specific outcome: the lot is not meant to be split in half, it’s meant to contain either a single house or a duplex. That building is meant to have an ample front and back yard, and a moderate side yard, so that it “looks like” a conventional house. The city kindly provides illustrations of what they’d like to see:

And you may think, “wait a minute, that actually seems like it would be pretty nice, why don’t we just build that?” You can see why people might like a code that requires this. But remember the model from the last post? We’re trying to hit a sale price of $400k and this lot costs $350k. The zoning code requires a large amount of land per home, and there’s just no way to make an affordable house if you start with requiring lots of expensive land — even if the house itself is was tiny.

When land is expensive, the easiest lever for affordability is to fit more homes on the same amount of land. By preventing that, or requiring an onerous and uncertain rezoning process to do it, cities effectively require higher cost housing.

And our elected officials know this! I opened with a quote from Mayor Johnston’s campaign site. Here’s another quote from further down the page:

To meaningfully achieve housing abundance in Denver, we must add density in select areas of the city, which is prohibited in many areas by our zoning code. As Mayor, I will explore sensible changes to zoning to help increase density in neighborhoods where it makes sense.

We know it works. The research shows that increases in density—even small ones—lead to lower rental costs.

In Denver, and in any city with high land prices, there are two straightforward solutions:

The simplest change is to keep the building form requirements, but remove the unit count restrictions. If what neighbors care about is the aesthetics of a neighborhood made of big houses with yards, the Four-Plex blends right in. Denver has manyexamples of historic multi-unit buildings that just look like big houses, sprinkled throughout the majority of established neighborhoods.

The next step would be to reduce minimum lot sizes, and revise the lot width, lot coverage, and setback rules to match. Houston famously “does not have zoning,” but it does have all the development regulations we talked about today. When Houston reduced its minimum lot sizes from 5,000 to 1,400 square feet, it led to the development of more than 34,000 new homes, mostly on formerly underutilized commercial and industrial land. More cities should follow Houston’s lead.

The challenge of course, is in the subtext of Mayor Johnston’s campaign message. That we must add density in “select areas, where it makes sense.” But that isn’t a viable approach.

As Strong Towns says:

No neighborhood should experience radical change, but no neighborhood can be exempt from change. It is not healthy for neighborhoods to radically transform, uprooting people and distorting established price relationships. It is equally unhealthy for neighborhoods to be locked in amber, artificially stagnating despite market demands or the needs of people within the community.

We can’t solve our housing problems within a paradigm of stasis. Cities need to allow the next increment by right, everywhere, to unlock healthy growth and achieve broadly affordable housing.

Thank you to and for their feedback on drafts!

One line of argument I’ve heard a few times is that the problem is “the developers,” who only build “luxury” housing. “Why don’t they just build middle-class houses again!” If they weren’t so greedy this wouldn’t be a problem.

But the thing about pent-up demand is, anyone who could figure out how to make money selling cheaper houses right now would make a lot of money. And in my experience, people like making money. That strongly implies that it’s harder than it sounds.1

I’m not a developer, but I’ve worked in urban planning and real estate in the past and I know “just enough to be dangerous.” So I thought it would be interesting to try and break this problem down from the developer’s point of view. My goal is to understand what it would actually take to build and sell a new affordable home in Denver, where I live. And to make sure I’m on the right track I asked a developer to check my homework. Here’s what I found.

Picking a price target

To try and deliver an affordable home I first need a price target — what constitutes “affordable?”

The most widely used definition of affordable housing comes from Department of Housing and Urban Development: they define it as housing that costs 30% of gross income or less. Denver’s Department of Housing Stability published figures for 2025 start from an Area Median Income of $98,100, and then take 30% of that to arrive at $2452/mo as affordable. So in Denver a single person earning the area median income “should” be able to afford a $2,452/mo payment.

How much house will that buy? Assuming a 6.5% interest rate (roughly where we are today), and Denver tax and insurance rates, that should be enough for a $400,000 home.2 This roughly matches another rule of thumb, that the cost of a house should be about 4 years of income ($98k ⨉ 4 = $392k).

Now, by targeting median income we’re really targeting the middle of the market, setting a price that about half of people in Denver could afford. So, on the one hand, this isn’t going to be affordable for everyone, but on the other hand it shouldn’t be too hard to deliver a new home for $400k, right?

Let’s try and find out.

Estimating the cost to develop a unit

To figure out what it would take to develop a new home for $400k, we need to break down the major cost components:

• Land Cost: the purchase price for a lot. We can look for vacant lots or teardown.

• Site Prep: the cost to clear and level the lot for construction.

• Site Improvement: the cost of landscaping and utilities. We’ll assume minimal landscaping, so this is mostly the cost of utilities.

• Hard Cost: the construction cost of the building.

• Soft Cost: the legal, design, engineering, and permitting fees to do the project

• Developer margin: what the developer gets paid for doing this work

Let’s estimate these and add them up and see where we land.

To determine the land price I went looking for vacant lots for sale in Denver. I think this one is a pretty good representation of a “typical” infill lot available for development in the city. So this puts our land price at $56/sqft.

To estimate the other costs and soft costs (Site prep, site improvement, hard cost, soft cost) I did a lot of digging online and sanity checked my numbers with a developer. We came up with these numbers as good enough for napkin math:

• Site prep: $3/sqft of land

• Site improvement: $5/sqft of land

• Hard Cost: $250/sqft of building

• Soft Cost: 7% of Hard Cost, or $18/sqft of building

To turn these into actual costs we have to decide how big of a home we want to build. Just as a starting point, let’s aim for a 1,500 sqft house — big enough to be comfortable for a family, but still relatively modest.

Finally we need to pay the developer. To keep this example easy to reason about, we’ll imagine it’s a small project that a developer will do with their own cash.3 This would be a bit unusual, but it doesn’t change the final numbers for the project by too much, so it’s worth the simplification.

How much should the developer (try to) pay himself or herself for a project? Since we’re assuming the developer is paying for this project with their own cash, the first thing to consider is what they could do with that cash instead. Just putting it in index funds would return around 10% most years. So, to think of this another way, if the developer does all work it takes to build a building, and they only earn 10% return on cash, they were working for free. As a rule of thumb, a rational developer shouldn’t pursue a project unless they think they can earn a 20% return. That leaves room for things to go wrong, and for the developer to still get paid for their efforts.

Modeling the project

If we plug the numbers we’ve come up with so far we get an initial estimate for the cost of this house. And, unfortunately, the model says this house will cost $984k — more than double our target price.

The first thing that we should notice is that the price of the land ($350k) consumed most of our $400k budget. How cheap would we need the land to be to pull this off? Unfortunately even setting the land cost to zero isn’t enough…

The second problem we have is that construction is really expensive. Even if we magically got the building for free, the land and site prep costs are enough to take us over budget.

Well, is it the greedy developer’s profit that’s the problem? Nope. Free development helps less than free land or free construction.

So we’re going to have to find another lever to pull. Since the land cost is the biggest up front cost, let’s take a harder look at that. What if we cut the lot in half and build two small houses instead of one? On the developer’s side the cost goes way up: he’s still paying for the lot and now we’re doubling the construction cost by building two houses. But on the buyer’s side the land area, and the cost of the land, is cut in half.

Ok, this is promising! If we keep splitting the lot into more units, maybe we can get somewhere?

Unfortunately, all we’re doing here is incrementing the denominator… Going from 1 to 1/2 is a much bigger drop than going from 1/2 to 1/3, and so on. Once we’re in the 4-6 unit range, going further isn’t helping very much. Also, we can only fit 3-4 small homes on a lot before we’d need to go to more of an apartment-style building.

Oh, and we’re not legally allowed to do this. The zoning for the lot in question doesallow two units (go Denver!), but only two. So, let’s go back to thinking about two units.

At this point, the only big lever we have left is the size of the units. Now, the cost of a house doesn’t actually scale perfectly per square foot — some costs are fixed, for example the cost of kitchen appliances, or bathroom fixtures, is not determined by the size of the kitchen or bathroom. But, for purposes of napkin math, we can try shrinking the house down until we hit our target budget.

As it turns out, if we shrink down to two tiny homes — 500 sqft each — the numbers just work out.

But, is this really a viable solution? In Denver, you can easily rent an apartment larger than 500 sqft for $2,500/mo. I’m not saying there’s no demand for tiny homes on small lots, but this feels like a risky project that would be hard to sell after building. So, what else could we do?

What about rezoning?

Let’s revisit the land cost one more time: what if we got a rezoning and could go back up to four units?

This is potentially more compelling. Reducing the land cost means we can make the homes bigger, and at 800 sqft per home, we’re closer to the “2 bedroom apartment” than a studio. The building is probably a four-plex that looks like a big house, or perhaps four little cottages. And at $377k, for new construction, we might find some interested buyers. But of course, remember this requires a rezoning, which means the developer probably has to spend several years fighting for permission to do the project.

Now this whole model so far has been assuming the project could be permitted, built, and sold in about a year. That’s not a very realistic timeline — most projects take several months to get permits even without variances or rezoning. But let’s take this as a best-case scenario and imagine the developer’s outcome:

Remember, the developer is choosing to do a bunch of work in hopes of earning more money on his cash than they would if they just put it in the stock market and did nothing. In this best-case scenario, the developer earns 20% return on investment, which is 10% better than they could make in the stock market during that time. By doing the project, they’ve effectively paid themselves $125k for one year of work. Seems good!

But if we are more realistic and assume the project takes 18 months to get rezoned and permitted (still might be too fast), and then another 18 months to build and sell, the developer’s return on labor is quite a bit worse. To properly estimate that we’d need to set up a more detailed model that takes into account *when* the developer has to put in different amounts of cash. Explaining that would be outside the scope of this post, but I did look into it, and concluded that in this scenario the developer’s profit after opportunity cost would be around $90k total, meaning they only paid themselves about $30k per year to do the work. For the kind of person who theoretically has $1.2M cash on hand in the first place, doing a lot of hard work to earn an extra $30k a year is probably not very compelling.

On the other hand, if Denver proactively reformed its zoning, a project like this would be a more viable option for providing some relatively affordable new-construction units.

Conclusions

These are the conclusions I drew from the development model — my hesitations and uncertainties about the definition of affordable housing aside.

(1) Filtering is crucial.

There’s broad agreement among researchers and housing advocates that one of the most powerful tools for providing affordable housing is “filtering.” The idea is: when the wealthiest people move into expensive new construction homes, they sell old home to someone slightly less wealthy, who in turn moves up and sells to someone slightly less wealthy, and so on, until the least nice homes in the city open up for lower incomes than previously.

For some, the idea that we’ll improve affordability through filtering is unintuitive and unsatisfying. They don’t want to see new construction at high prices, they want to see new construction that’s cheap. But this exercise shows us, new construction is just never going to be super cheap.

I think a good metaphor here is the car market. We all understand that, while new cars come in a range of prices, they are, in general, pretty expensive. If you want a cheaper car, you buy a used car — we have lots of good used cars available at much lower prices than new cars.

We should think of housing in the same way. Since new construction just isn’t cheap, we’ll get more leverage by adding new houses for people above the median income, so they will move out of their used houses and make those available at more affordable prices for people below median income. This is more practical and more economically feasible, and in fact, a recent study by Boaz Abramson and Tim Landvoigt confirmed that adding high-end housing supply improves overall affordability more than new construction at the lower end.

(2) Incremental Housing is not a half-measure, it’s the bees-knees

Earlier we did the math with the land set to zero and saw how much that helped. That’s what a backyard cottage (ADU) does. The land is already a sunk cost for the primary home, so the added housing unit is just construction cost.

Sometimes housing folks frame ADU’s as a baby step, or “half-loaf.” I disagree! Backyard cottages and accessory apartments will always be one of the very cheapest ways to increase the supply of homes, because they’re the only kind of unit that doesn’t need to incur land cost up front. Also, this kind of incremental housing is probably the most scalable way to add housing supply.

(3) Cities should try to de-professionalize small scale development

Today, getting a building permit in most major metros is laborious, byzantine process that most people find too daunting to try. Some cities today are fixing this by offering pre-approved building plans, so that an interested party can walk in to the city, pick a plan from a catalog, and call a list of registered contractors who are happy to build that unit. More cities should follow suit!

Pre-approved plans take the soft cost and entitlement delay to nearly zero, but it could also knock developer margin off a lot of projects, by opening up the market for normal people to do more projects for themselves instead of as an investment. What if you bought a lot and the city would help you build on it instead of being an intimidating obstacle that only professionals can overcome? Imagine a young professional building a duplex, living in one half and renting the other half. They don’t need to make a 20% margin on that, because the cash flow is going to offset their cost of housing.

That’s how we “unleash the swarm” of local development, produce abundant housing, and drive down cost.

Thank you to Allison Lehman, Deric Tilson, Seth Zeren, and Mike Riggs for feedback on this essay!

This constitutes a vacation from living in places that look like this:

For the people who live nearby these are both “ordinary streets,” but as you can see the experience of being in these two places is radically different. The first is an exciting, lively environment that makes you want to wander around and explore. The second is a public utility you drive through because you’re going somewhere, not a place you’d want to stop and hang out.

This difference is so stark because they’re actually two different things. The photo from Amsterdam is a Street: a public space that connects individual properties and provides human access and circulation through a neighborhood. By contrast, a Road is a dedicated path for moving vehicles from point A to point B as quickly and safely as possible. And, unfortunately, the photo from Aurora is a Stroad, a dangerous hybrid that tries to combine high-speed traffic with local access and does a bad job at both. (For a deeper dive see Streets and Roads).

The bare minimum requirement for a street is that it’s a publicly accessible space that usefully connects multiple properties. An example would be a residential street with a sidewalk. If people can practically use it for walking their dogs and visiting their neighbors, that’s a street.

If people can’t walk around and experience the space outside a vehicle, either because of the excessive distance between points or because there’s no safe place for pedestrians, then it’s not a street.

What is a Great Street?

A great street is a public space that’s fun to explore.

Great streets attract people.

They create convergence points, a virtuous cycle of investment and wealth creation.

A Great street a place where you’d do more than just visit a home or a business, you’d want to hang out.

As a visitor, a great street makes you think fondly about moving to the neighborhood.

As a resident, it makes you feel connected to, and proud of, the place you live.

Why should Great Streets be a priority?

North America has plenty of historic streets, some of which are well-preserved and remain vibrant to this day.

But in our mid-century excitement over the automobile, we lost our cultural memory of what streets are, and how to make them great. So in most of our places that look like this…

…we did things like this:

Notice that in the second photo, we have both a low-rise strip center on the left, and a mid-century high-rise apartment building in the background. You can see how this is discontinuous from the historic Main Street environment it replaced. It’s worth noting: those developments mark the last time it was easy for developers to replace small old buildings with larger ones. That lost ability to build great streets contributed to the general anti-development shift in our culture1.

For pro-housing advocates in supply-constrained cities: if we want to shift the culture around adding housing, and to build momentum and support for infill and abundant incremental development, that development has to make neighborhoods nicer, not just denser. That means treating streets as important public spaces, and ensuring that buildings connect to them well.

Creating the right conditions

Once we’ve set our minds to making great streets, we face a dilemma. Actually, cities can only create good streets. Truly great streets have to emerge organically, but they can only do so where the conditions are right.

In City Comforts, David Sucher describes it this way:

Caution to planners:

Creating community — which is what all this boils down to — is a worthy goal. But it is a goal largely beyond the reach of government.

Community evolves from individual conversations. … Interesting public spaces provide only a framework, with the daily details supplied by aware entrepreneurs who recognize what is working and what is not, and act immediately.

So our actual goal is to create a good street, with the right conditions for a great street to emerge. To do that, we’re going to have to solve three problems:

1. What to do with the conduits, especially the travel lanes for cars

2. What to do with the public interface, i.e. the walkway and any public space around it

3. What to do with the private interface, i.e. the way the private property attaches to the street

In the rest of this essay I’ll describe how we can solve each of these, listing the solutions in order of importance. This is a longer post than usual, so I’ll also include a short recap at the end.

The parts of a street

One last thing: before we talk about how to make a great street, we need to understand its component parts.

Most streets contain multiple conduits, the main one being the dedicated lanes for cars down the middle of the street. Other conduits include utility lines (power, telecom, sewer, water), or possibly bike or bus lanes.

Outside the travel lanes we have the Interface, the connection between the public and private space. Public property (specifically the Right of Way, or ROW) typically extends well past the curb; it often includes a planter strip and ends at the outside edge of a sidewalk.2 Private property abuts the ROW, but the front edge is semi-public in character; picture front yards, porches, patios, storefronts, etc. (For a deeper dive, see The Elements of a City)

Handling the Conduits

The first requirement of a good street is that it be safe, which mostly means safe from automobile traffic.3 To do that, we design the travel lanes such that people will naturally drive slowly — in practice 20mph or less.4

Narrow lanes

The biggest factor in driving speed is the width of the travel lane, so to limit speed we keep travel lanes narrow. From there we can add curb extensions like gateways and pinchpoints, or horizontal deflections, called chicanes, that make drivers turn slightly.

On-street parking also helpful, since it has the effect of narrowing the travel lanes, providing a physical barrier between pedestrians and cars in motion, and providing convenient access for people who drive to the street.

Short, safe crossings

Great streets put a special emphasis on pedestrian crossings. Intersections should be compact, so that crossings are short. Ideally crossings should also be level, meaning cars have to actually drive up onto the intersection like a giant speed bump. That signals to everyone that pedestrians have priority.

Shared streets

In cases where there’s low need for car access, either because it’s a quiet residential setting, or a moderate to high density mixed-use setting where most people can walk to their destination, we could reach for the gold standard of street design: a shared street.

These are rare in North America, but I hope we’ll see more of them in the future.

The City’s Role

Everything in this section is the City Government’s job. It needs to plan the network of roads and transit such that streets are not over-burdened with traffic. And it needs to design the streets to ensure safe speeds, safe intersections, and protection from traffic. There’s an extensive body of research on how to do this. For a deeper dive, I recommend the NACTO Urban Street Design Guide.

The public interface

Given we have safely handled the cars (or have limited/no car access), the next element we need to get right is the public interface, i.e. the sidewalk and all the space between the curb and the edge of the public right of way. It’s not hard to get the walkway right, but a few critical functional requirements must be met.

Continuous paths (clear of utilities)

This is the most obvious requirement, and yet one that is violated surprisingly often: Sidewalks should be continuous. They shouldn’t be interrupted by utility poles or other fixed objects.5

Examples of failure:

Where they exist, or can be built, alleys are a great solution for power and telecom lines, as well as parking and trash pick up. Having the utility space in the back takes this burden off the street and makes it nicer overall.

Sufficient walking space

A walking path should be at least wide enough for two people to pass.

Five feet is usually enough for two adults, but more is much nicer. At ten feet there’s enough space for small groups to pass each other without much contortion. Strolling is much more pleasant when you can hold hands with your partner, your kids, versus having to line up single file to pass other people.

Let’s talk about planter strips. I think planter strips are overrated, and in most cases it would be better if there was a wider sidewalk instead. You can see in these two examples, this five-foot sidewalk isn’t wide enough for the volume and the planter strip is pretty sad.

Meanwhile, you can still have tree wells in wider sidewalks, and the result is a much more practical walking surface.

I think some people feel like a 10 feet or wider concrete sidewalk feels too barren, but you can make this much nicer with mixed materials.

If budget allows you can also incorporate planters and other decoration into the walkway to create a greener space while still maintaining more than a 5-foot walking space.

There’s one tradeoff here: you don’t need a massive sidewalk when a place is low density. If it grows, you want to be able to expand, but you don’t want to kill the trees or mess up the direct access. So one approach is to make the sidewalk further away from the curb and leave generous tree planting spaces a bit further apart but skewed towards the curb. Then, if you needed to later, you could widen your sidewalk into the planter strip without encroaching too much on the trees.

Surface quality

The street and sidewalk surfaces should be well-maintained, such that potholes or other hazards don’t cause people to trip and fall, or have to pay constant attention to the surface to avoid doing so. The walkway should be clear of plants and branches.

Drainage

The walking surface needs to drain properly, especially in places that see heavy rain. In winter, where relevant, the surface needs to be kept clear of snow and ice.

Lighting

At night, the street needs to be well-lit. Creative and artistic lighting is also a chance to make a street far more beautiful. There’s enough here for an entirely different article, so I’ll suggest this one as a good read.

Sun and Shade

A great street should have shade so that people don’t overheat in the summer. In the winter, there should be sunshine so it doesn’t feel as cold.

As it happens, we have this marvelous technology called deciduous trees that create shade in the summer but drop their leaves and allow sunlight in the winter. Street trees are a great idea, and should be planted widely.

Seating

Having space to stop and sit for a while makes the street a nicer, more sociable, and more inclusive street.

In his classic work, “The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces,” William Whyte sung the praises of the moveable chair:

Now, a wonderful invention--the moveable chair. Having a back, it is comfortable; more so, if it has an armrest as well. But the big asset is movability. Chairs enlarge choice: to move into the sun, out of it, to make rooms for groups, move away from them. The possibility of choice is as important as the exercise of it. If you know you can move if you want to, you feel more comfortable staying put. This is why, perhaps, people so often move a chair a few inches this way and that before sitting in it, with the chair ending up about where it was in the first place. The moves are functional, however. They are a declaration of autonomy, to oneself, and rather satisfying.

Cities should allow businesses to put out moveable chairs and tables, so long as they’re not blocking the middle of the walkway.

The City’s Role

As in the previous section, designing and maintaining the public interface is primarily the city’s job. At minimum the city needs to maintain a clear, continuous walkway that’s wide enough, drains properly, and is lit at night. Above that, providing creative lighting and street trees will enhance the utility and beauty of the street.

Note that while I’ve split the design of the travel lanes and utilities from the public interface, most cities are going to have a public works department that treats all of this as a single exercise: they’ll design and build travel lanes for cars as their main concern, and may also install sidewalks as an afterthought. Pragmatically, it makes sense to have a single department that designs and constructs the public right of way, but public interface design should be given much more weight than is typical today.

The private interface

Given we’ve adequately handled the public right of way, with safe conduits and a good walkway, we can turn our attention to the other half of the interface: the private properties that attach to the street.

Streets are practical public spaces. For a street to be great it first needs to be useful, or people won’t go there. Once a street is useful, the goal should be to make it interesting.

Active Use

The ground floor of properties facing the street should be actively used — meaning it should not be used just for utilities or parking. The ground floor is sufficient, but the first two floors is better. Higher than that is not very perceptible.

Having a wide variety of uses in close proximity (aka “multi-use” or “mixed-use”) is also a good idea, as it makes the street more useful and potentially more interesting.

Pedestrian Access

Streets should have direct pedestrian access from the public interface to the private property. In other words, the property should have a front door, and that front door should be directly connected to the street. In some cases this could be a shopfront that opens onto the street, or it could be set back and connected via a walkway.

Car access is also important — specifically, it’s important that car access not excessively interrupt the pedestrian space. Too many driveways ruin the walkway and the walking experience. While on-street parking is fine, driveways should be minimized, and pedestrians should never have to cross a parking lot to enter a building. Where parking lots are required, they should be behind or beside a building, not in front (Alleys make this much easier).

Access Point Spacing

The next step up from direct access is to have more frequent access points. Because walking isn’t very fast, a street is more useful when it connects more destinations in the same amount of linear space. That means it’s more interesting to walk through a place with lots that are narrow and deep vs. wide and shallow. This is true for both residential and commercial uses.

Access points further apart are okay when necessary, but the farther apart the access points are the more sterile the environment will feel. As access points get more than 100 feet apart people will increasingly feel that they aren’t meant to walk there, so they won’t.

One access point every 50 feet is enough to be interesting, but closer together is even better. In a commercial or mixed-use context, the most vibrant commercial streets tend to have almost continuous access.

Orientation

Logically extending the idea of more frequent access points, spaces should be oriented with the narrow side to the street when possible.

Both homes and businesses naturally have spaces that are more public and more private, you want to give plenty of room for privacy in the back, don’t make people stick the private space along the street frontage. This is a common problem with retail space that lines parking garages — it ends up having lots of “back of house” stuff in the front, either screened off or open to the world to see.

Transparency

Ideally, building frontages should be partially transparent, which is a fancy way of saying they need windows. It’s probably obvious that blank walls are uninviting, but it’s surprisingly common for businesses that have windows to use frosted glass or keep curtains drawn, etc. There’s a tradeoff between the inviting openness of a shopfront or a lobby, versus the need for private space. This is one reason to prefer lots (and buildings) oriented with the narrow side to the street — the interior is inherently private.

For houses and townhomes, front porches and stoops create a welcoming semi-public interface, while the ground floor being slightly elevated improves the privacy inside the home.

Conversely, for commercial space, it’s far better to have at-grade access. Elevated commercial spaces are less accessible and will require ramps to meet ADA requirements, creating friction between the public space and the business.

The City’s role

To create great streets, the city should regulate the private interface. I hope these examples have given you an idea of what that might look like.

At minimum cities should set standards for active use on the ground floor and direct access from the street. Beyond that, I would recommend cities create guidelines and incentives for orientation, maximum access point spacing, and transparency.

Note that these kinds of requirements are generally found in form-based codes, but you may notice that in all this discussion I didn’t have anything to say about the architecture of the buildings themselves.

I would not generally recommend requiring particular architecture styles, details, or signage. These put a high burden of review and add a lot of subjectivity to the approval process. In practice, trying to “require beauty” becomes the same thing as “requiring luxury,” which is inherently exclusionary.

Instead, I would encourage cities to do things like publish pattern books and pre-approved plans, and find ways to incentivize the kind of architecture they want to see. But buildings come and go; if a place is highly functional then mediocre buildings won’t kill it.

Lastly, I think cities should favor public interface requirements over strict single-use zoning. Making the buildings fit together nicely does a better job achieving “compatibility” with “neighborhood character” than micromanaging land use.

Recap / Checklist

To create the conditions for a great street, we don’t necessarily have to accomplish everything on this list. Most great streets of the world still have some “warts” in places — a building that’s too wide, an empty storefront, a section of blank wall, or sidewalks that are too narrow at points. That’s okay. The goal should be to check as many of these boxes as we can. The more of these guidelines a street meets, the more likely a great street will emerge.

And so you don’t have to scroll back through all of that to remember, here’s the checklist:

For the Conduit:

• Narrow Lanes

• Short, safe crossings

• Shared streets (where feasible)

For the Public Interface:

• Continuous paths (clear of utilities)

• Sufficient walking space

• Surface quality

• Drainage

• Lighting

• Sun and Shade

• Seating

For the Private Interface:

• Active Use

• Pedestrian Access

• Access Point Spacing

• Orientation

• Transparency

These fifteen ingredients are all it takes to make magic.

When it all comes together

The space/time paradox of cities is that people trade space for serendipity.

Great streets are places for people to come together, to bump into each other and have an unexpected conversation.

Try to walk past an ice cream shop without smiling at least a little bit.

Or this cat cafe — even as someone highly allergic, it makes me happy that this exists.

These are the simple joys of neighborhood life, the beauty of the world we make together.

The city can’t do this alone, nor can any individual resident or entrepreneur. Serendipity is a wildflower that blooms where the conditions are right. But the conditions are not mysterious or difficult to create. Human societies did this instinctively for millennia before we decided to do things differently.

We could make different choices, and make great streets our default again. Let’s do that.

Thanks to Mike Riggs, Hiya Jain, and Abby ShalekBriski for feedback on drafts of this essay.

In the last two posts I talked about how urbanists use the words “urban” and “suburban.” In the first post I illustrated how even urbanists don’t precisely agree on what these words mean, and how we risk misunderstanding or talking past each other. In the second post I offered some more precise terms for the characteristics I think are the most salient in distinguishing places (street connectivity, street safety, and mix of land uses).

At the end of the last post I skimmed past an important higher level connection between “urban/suburban” and “pre-war/post-war” terminology.

…it’s tempting to say that the post-war combinations are “suburban” and the pre-war combinations are “urban,” but as we discussed last time that would be missing the point. Describing the functional characteristics of place that we care about instead can avoid the baggage and misunderstandings, and will help us have better discussions.

After reflection, I think this one warrants a bit more unpacking.

It’s not an incidental detail that the positive characteristics of places strongly correlate with “pre-war” development and the negative characteristics strongly correlate with “post-war” development: The way we build human habitat changed dramatically in the 20th century; the post-war building boom represented the definitive entrenchment of the new culture and the death of the old.

Thus when urbanists use the label “suburban” we’re more often referring to the post-war pattern of development, not to smaller towns outside a larger city, or residential communities where people commute to a central city.

The Congress for the New Urbanism refers to the post-war pattern of development as Conventional Suburban Development (CSD), usually contrasted with Traditional Neighborhood Development(TND) or “Sustainable Urban Development”. Strong Towns calls it The Suburban Experiment. Many detractors call it “Suburban Sprawl.”

But in light of our discussion of “urban” vs “suburban,” I’m coming around to the view that including “suburban” in the label is distracting (if not misleading), because (1) the suburbs predate post-war development shift by about a century, and (2) the streetcar suburbs are arguably both the zenith and best preserved example of the pre-war development model.

Trying to avoid using the word “suburban”, perhaps we could simply say that we’re contrasting Contemporary Development with Traditional or Historic Development.

Using the terminology I outlined last time we can describe these more precisely:

• The Historic Norm was well-connected + mixed-use + safe for kids

• The Contemporary Norm is disconnected + single-use + unsafe

This gives us a good description of the physical change that happened, but it elides the cultural change that came with it.

This year I’ve proposed that cities should Plan Roads, Design Streets, Regulate Interfaces, Embrace Change, and Accept Opposition. The first three principles pertain to the physical design and form of the community, the last two are cultural. Let’s connect the cultural dots.

How American place-making norms changed

Within the realm of city building, three 20th century norm-changes radically reshaped the way we live, leading directly to the problems we’re grappling with today. I use the word “norms,” because these changes are deeper than any particular law, policy, or program. These are cultural assumptions, the why behind the policy and design choices we make, which ultimately constrain what we build.

Because these have been written about extensively, I’m going to describe them briefly with links to deeper reading.

From a flexible mix of buildings and uses to rigid separation

In the past, land use in cities tended to be highly mixed. This meant any given street might have a mix of houses, townhomes, and apartments, as well as corner stores and small businesses. Early planners championed zoning to physically separate activities they deemed incompatible, including intentionally using zoning to exclude more affordable housing types (and the people who would live in them) from most neighborhoods. Today we’ve atomized the city — central planners dictate strict zones for every type of activity, and even every type of building.

Deep Dives: Arbitrary Lines, The Death and Life of Great American Cities

From dynamic and adaptive to static and stifled

In the past, neighborhoods evolved and “matured” much more than they do today. Across North America, neighborhoods would start with simple, cheap buildings, and then incrementally evolve in place. If a place prospered, small wooden boxes would give way to small brick buildings, then larger and grander buildings as the community continued to grow. Today we aim to design and build places to a finished state, and then bind them in restrictions to resist change. Growth and change are mostly limited to the Greenfield edge, and in some cases the historic city center (which, in many cities, is less restricted as an artifact of the historic norm).

Deep Dives: Suburban Nation, the ULI and J.C. Nichols

From human-first to car-first

The most visible change in our norms started during the 20’s, went on quietly during the Great Depression and World War 2 (when the US as a whole wasn’t building much), then exploded into the public consciousness with the post-war housing boom. Historic cities were oriented around humans, built on the assumption that most people would go most places on foot. After all, what other choice did they have? But modernist planners were confident that in the future everyone would travel everywhere by car, and baked that design requirement into all manner of city, state and federal policy and programs. Among the least known but most impactful, the FHA incorporated car-oriented design as a mortgage lending requirement.

Deep Dives: Fighting Traffic, Confessions of a Recovering Engineer

Norms for a better future

When I look at these three contemporary norms, I see ideas that are out of step with the values of the broad American public. Americans want affordable housing in their community, including more affordable housing types. We’re a dynamic country that values entrepreneurship, technological progress, and the American Dream of upward mobility. We value walkability so much that we’re willing to pay a premium to get it.

The specific policies and approaches we adopt are downstream of our values. To undo the damage caused by the mid-century planners, we should promote norms that fit our values better.

• Integrated: We should favor complimentary mixed use and a variety of building types for more affordable, inclusive communities.

• Adaptive: We should embrace change, prioritizing adaptability and resilience.

• Human-first: We should accommodate mobility technology, but design for humans — especially children.

The mid-century planners correctly identified real problems with industrial-era cities and tried to solve them, but their top-down approach lacked a fundamental understanding of what makes places work for people. They mistook complexity for chaos, evolution for decay, and human scale for inefficiency. The contemporary norms of separation, stasis, and car-dependence aren't laws of nature—they're choices we made, and choices we can unmake. Doing so would better align our building practices with the values we already hold.

In this post I’ll describe three different characteristics of place, each of which plays a critical role in how a place functions. We can think of each characteristic as a scale of sorts, and label the low, medium, and high point. In each case, higher is better. Together, these labels offer a more nuanced taxonomy of place. Among people who have developed a deeper interest in cities and how they work, I hope that these labels could facilitate richer and clearer discussions.

I’ve tried to use terms that are intuitive, and I think these would be easy enough to use in conversations with the broad public, even while I do not expect normal people to learn this taxonomy. After you read I’d love to hear what you think.

Two things to note up front:

• This is a taxonomy of developed places, where “developed” means something like, more than 50% of the land is built out, and the population density is greater than 1,000 people per square mile.1

• These labels describe places as a whole, meaning neighborhoods, towns, and cities in their general or prevailing condition, not at the level of a single lot or block.

Street Connectivity

The single most important characteristic of a place is its street pattern - not the design (or cross section) but the shape of the network (ie as you see it on a map). What matters is how well-connected the street network is.

We can label three levels of street connectivity:

Disconnected

Typical of suburban areas built after the 1980’s, most development today is intentionally disconnected from the rest of the surrounding area. Subdivisions rely on just one or two connector roads to connect to the outside world, and to the extent the internal streets form a network at all, they’re a fully a closed system. While these developments are not all literally gated, they’re functionally gated. This pattern of development creates long minimum distances between destinations, typically getting to anything outside the development is at least a 5-10 minute drive, if not longer. It also results in traffic congestion on the small number of roads that actually go anywhere, which gets worse and worse with further development.

Sparse

Earlier suburban areas tend to have large blocks and curvilinear streets, but still form a somewhat connected pattern. Walking and biking may be slow if the area is low density, but neighborhood services are often accessible without traversing on arterial roads. Driving is the most practical option, but other modes are still viable. This pattern still tends to concentrate traffic on a small number of major roads, but it handles growth much better than disconnected streets.

Connected

Until the middle of the 20th century, cities tended to be built with well-connected blocks, often in a grid, but also in more organic patterns. Travel between destinations is quick and efficient with relatively direct paths, and with many options to get from A to B, travel is diffused through the network. Every mode of travel is equally viable in a well-connected environment.

Ideally, cities’ street networks would always be well-connected. This pattern is the most flexible and adaptable over time, and offers the most convenience for all modes of travel. We shifted from connected to disconnected street patterns largely because people don’t like excessive high-speed traffic pouring through their neighborhoods, but fortunately we have better solutions to that problem that don’t force every mode to take circuitous routes.

Land use Diversity

The second dimension of place is economic diversity, that is, having a mix of land uses available in close proximity — meaning diversity of the economic activity (residential / commercial / office, etc.) and building type (single family / duplex / apartment, etc.).

We can label three levels of land use diversity:

Single-use

Most greenfield development in the last 50+ years has been single-use, with large residential districts separated from commercial corridors. Not only are vast areas of land restricted to a single use category, most of these residential areas contain only single building type (detached houses) in a narrow band of size and price point.

Multi-use

Multi-use (or horizontal mixed use, if you prefer), is the traditional pattern of cities and towns for most of human history.

This neighborhood in Denver is a good example. In the photo you can see a row of shops with an apartment building directly behind them. The surrounding blocks are predominately lower-density residential, with a mix of detached houses, duplexes, and small apartments. The diversity of land use means many daily activities are sprinkled through the neighborhood, quick and convenient to access.

Mixed-use

At higher levels of development we start to see uses mix in a single lot.

Places should ideally have high land use diversity: Just as monocultures are less productive than diverse ecosystems, human communities are healthier, more prosperous, and more resilient when they contain a diverse mix of land uses. In most neighborhoods and smaller towns, that would mean a “multi-use” mix of housing types with small businesses and neighborhood services sprinkled conveniently throughout. In more developed areas with larger buildings we’d see vertical “mixed-use” as well.

Street Safety

The last dimension of place to consider is street safety: specifically how the design of the street makes it either dangerous or safe for different users. Remember: streets and roads are different, so this question applies to the streets that provide access to and from properties, not highways.

You don’t need any expertise or training to understand street safety, just go for a walk and think about how you feel. Are you worried about getting hit by a car, or tripping and falling, or squeezing past obstacles? Or is the space comfortable and worry-free to inhabit?

We can label three levels of street safety:

Unsafe

Just taking this picture was nerve-wracking. If you can’t tell, that sidewalk is about two feet wide, and the adjacent traffic averages 40-50 mph. Conditions like these are quite common throughout the US.

Safe for Adults

Here we have a fairly standard residential sidewalk, followed by a nice Main Street.

These environments are safe and comfortable for adults. However, as a parent, they’re still stressful with kids, as children aren’t born with a sufficient fear of being run over. Intersections and high speed traffic are the main danger, but the sidewalk itself is safe.

Safe for Kids

In a pedestrian-priority street, kids can safely roam freely. Streets like this are almost non existent in North America, but are becoming more common globally, especially in the Netherlands.

The Dutch call this kind of street a “woonerf,” which means something like “a street for living.” These are increasingly the standard for residential areas in the Netherlands — accessible for cars but designed for very low speeds so that crashes aren’t a concern.

With limited exceptions, our street networks (streets, not roads) should be designed and built with “safe for children” as the goal.

Order of importance

The ideal human habitat is safe, diverse, and well-connected. These aren’t the only dimensions of place that matter, but they’re the pillars of a healthy community. On each dimension, the “middle” label represents a kind of minimum viable place; places that have at least a sparse network, permit land use diversity, and make their streets safe, are well-equipped to adapt to change over time.

None of these characteristics of place are easy to improve, but there’s a clear order of importance:

Street safety is the most straightforward dimension to improve. It takes money and time to rebuild a street into a safer configuration, but cities own their rights of way and have the authority to “just do it” if they want. Tactical urbanism can be a fast, cheap, first step. However it happens, once construction is done, the change is finished.

Land use diversity is more complex. On the one hand, the reason this is rare today is that it’s illegal. City councils have the power to change their laws, and could legalize land use diversity in a single council session at no cost to the public. On the other hand, even if it were legal immediately, buildings are not cheap or easy to turn over, and the impact of such reform would play out over a generation or longer.

Street connectivity is by far the most difficult to fix after initial development. In fact I would say it’s nearly impossible, and is mostly not going to happen. This isn’t because we can’t imagine how to fix the design, it’s because doing so would be a huge investment in low-value, low-productivity places, that is highly unlikely to ever pay for itself. Buildings come and go, but rights of way last forever.

Thus the order of importance: street connectivity > land use diversity > street safety.

Permutations

Using these labels together we can describe different kinds of places in a more nuanced and specific way. I was tempted to try and create a 3x3x3 graphic and attempt to give each permutation a name, but the dimensions don’t really work like that. Instead, a few permutations are common, and most are quite rare.

Most postwar development in the US is single use and not well-connected. Safety varies widely in these places, with newer neighborhood more likely to have sidewalks and some traffic calming, while older neighborhoods and commercial zones are more likely to have wide streets and no sidewalks or safety accommodations at all. These permutations are common:

• Disconnected, Single-use, Unsafe

• Disconnected, Single-use, Safe for Adults

• Sparse, Single-use, Unsafe

• Sparse, Single-use, Safe for Adults

Conversely, most pre-war development is at least multi-use, and the streets are usually safe for adults. These permutations are common:

• Sparse, multi-use, safe for adults

• Sparse, mixed-use, safe for adults

• Connected, multi-use, safe for adults

• Connected, mixed-use, safe for adults

Applying the terms

Now, it’s tempting to say that the post-war combinations are “suburban” and the pre-war combinations are “urban,” but as we discussed last time that would be missing the point. Describing the functional characteristics of place we care about instead can avoid the baggage and misunderstandings, and will help us have better discussions.

As an example: instead of saying that my parents and my in-laws both live in “suburban” neighborhoods, while I live in an “urban” neighborhood, I could say that my parents’ neighborhood is disconnected and single use, my in-laws neighborhood is sparse and multi-use, and my neighborhood is connected and mixed-use. (They’re all Safe for Adults, so I left that out.)

This is actually pretty helpful, because it describes the qualitative difference between their neighborhoods. I strongly prefer my in-laws neighborhood over that of my parents - the taxonomy highlights the reason.

The other benefit of this system is that is helps us think about how places have changed, or are changing, and the direction they should ideally move. For instance, as a former industrial area, the River North district in Denver was sparse, single use, and unsafe. The area is rapidly filling in with vertical mixed use: residential, retail, and entertainment. Ideally the neighborhood should invest in safer streets, and (if possible) improved street connectivity.

I’ll close by repeating, I hope that these labels could facilitate richer and clearer discussions, especially among people who have taken an interest in cities and how they work. If you made it this far I’m sure you’re one of them, so please let me know what you think! And if you find these helpful in future conversations I’d love to hear about it.