Strong Towns recently published an interesting set of articles talking about something they refer to as "pretextual planning." Articles here and here. What they mean by this is that sometimes we create planning rules not necessarily because we think they are the right thing to do, but because they serve as good bargaining chips when dealing with developers and builders. For example, let's not eliminate parking minimums but instead concede on it during the entitlement process. This, the articles argue, is not good practice. And I would of course agree with that.

But here is another very valid point that is made: when you make building so painfully complicated you end up creating a whole bunch of negative externalities. Not only does the cost of housing and building go up, but you also 1) make it more difficult for smaller builders to participate in the market and 2) you end up increasing the minimum size of new developments. And that is because as projects get more complicated and expensive, you end up needing larger and larger projects to amortize / justify the development expenses.

It's really too bad.

This is a chart from Abundant Housing LA (a YIMBY group), via City Observatory, showing the relationship between median household income and single-family zoning across the 88 cities that make up L.A. County. On average, about 80% of the land in the County is zoned for single-family housing. This is also true for Los Angeles, which is not surprisingly its biggest city. What is pretty clear from this chart is that the richest areas tend to have a higher percentage of single-family homes. If you read Anthony Dedousis' post, you'll also see that the housing tends to be more expensive (makes sense) and that the homeownership rates are higher in these single-family areas. One obvious takeaway is that it shows you how clearly we are dividing our cities. Zoning is regulation. And here we are seeing some of the socioeconomic implications. But I'm curious if this relationship would be as strong in other cities around the world and at different scales (i.e. neighborhood levels). When it's made available (not all cities have this much space), how universal is this pull toward single-family housing?

Here's some food for thought around electrical vehicles. In this recent article in The American Conservative, Jordan McGillis argues that, "the electric vehicle is the climate idol of the unimaginative."

Rather than simply changing what's under the hood of our cars, we should be reexamining the broader impacts that the car has had on the urban landscape. Here's an excerpt that speaks to this:

"All of the effort directed towards EV adoption would be better expended on improving our development patterns, bringing them to human-scale and reducing the necessity of the automobile. The obvious reform candidate is zoning. According to the New York Times, it is illegal to build anything other than a single-family home on 75 percent of land zoned for residential use in the United States. Zoning exclusively for single-family homes artificially flattens our cities, necessitates daily automobile commutes, and increases our greenhouse gas emissions. As Istvan Bart has documented for the Climate Strategy Institute, suburban sprawl bears more responsibility for increased emissions from transportation than either population or GDP."

There is no question that electric vehicles are helpful to addressing climate change. But Jordan is also not wrong. We can't ignore that built form is crucial to this discussion, and likely even more important.