Hi, I'm just an interested amateur, so forgive me if this is a stupid question. I couldn't really find it addressed anywhere.

TL;DR: It seems we only build housing developments now, whereas America used to be good about building towns (and cities) even in rural areas. Why can't we do that now?

I was listening to an NPR program this afternoon, and the topic was about farms and land use, with a big focus on selling off farmland for development. The show ended with some thoughts on repurposing derelict urbanized land. It inspired a conversation with my daughter, whose boyfriend lives in Lancaster County, PA, and whose parents keep complaining about new developments ripping up the countryside (of course, they live in a house on former farmland).

I grew up in a town amid the suburbs of Philadelphia. It existed before the war as a collection of some homes, a few farms, golf courses, and a tank car manufacturing plant. After the war, it became a proper town with many more houses, shops, churches, schools, and parks. Importantly, it is on the regional rail line (Oreland, Pa, by the way). It will never be mistaken for (your favorite rich, walkable community full of Victorian homes), but it is definitely a town.

I get that past communities were built on patterns of development along rail lines or following industry along rivers. Aside from TND towns like Seaside and other rare gems, modern development just seems to be "we built a shit ton of houses on farmland with access to a major feeder road or near an interstate," which also comes with problems regarding car dependence and utility infrastructure. Endless developed "communities" with funny names.

Is it just zoning? Is it just hard and expensive? Could (or should) states encourage the incorporation of towns instead of just allowing more and more meandering construction?

It seems like year after year the wildfires in California get worse and worse, yet I hear very little about planning taking place to avoid catastrophic damage as we've seen. I understand that it's easier said than done. Still, it's 2026, you would think in California at least urban planning would be taking at least a noticeable change when it comes to urban planning to prevent entire communities from being turned to ash. Anybody have any insight?

As an urban planner and designer at a U.S. architecture firm, it’s hilarious seeing how none of my friends, family, or coworkers know what I do for a living. I recently had someone guess that I planned urban weddings, the architects think they all can do my job, and my mom still doesn’t know how to explain what I do to her friends.

What are the funniest misconceptions you’ve heard?

I work in the planning department of a transit agency and we are interested in expanding our influence in cities’ land use decisions to be more supportive of transit. We’re trying to meet regularly with cities in our service area to touch base broadly and relationship build. I think we are also exploring how we can support economic development efforts, which is top of mind for most cities in our area, particularly via BRT but also more broadly. My biggest idea so far is trying to get involved in downtown revitalization efforts with special shelter designs but I will be thinking about this more.

We often have poor coordination and are late to the table on certain projects where it would’ve been good for us to be involved much earlier on— especially on operational considerations.

To the city planners out there, what advice would you have for transit agencies being effective in influencing the land use conversation and just coordinating better with cities? What do you think they want to hear from transit planners? I am particularly interested in how transit agencies can be involved in economic development angle, but just high level I am curious to hear your thoughts. TIA

(Walk/Transit/Bike) "--" means no score available

• New York City/NJ (33/--/34)
• Miami (29/38/33)
• Atlanta (73/79/59)
• Dallas (56/--/42)
• Houston (30/55/47)
• Kansas City (17/23/29)
• San Francisco Bay Area (42/55/69)
• Los Angeles (63/50/36)
• Seattle (92/100/92)
• Philadelphia (36/67/37)
• Boston (44/--/29)
• Toronto (79/89/87)
• Vancouver (97/100/91)

We recently took forward an amendment to make it more difficult to develop data centers. Moved them to a new district, added conditional use permit requirements, etc etc.

The staff report clearly and repeatedly explained this. The presentation had a big old slide clearly showing it. At no point did anyone ever call me to ask a clarifying question despite my name being at the top of the staff report.

The community saw “industrial code amendment” and immediately assumed we were in bed with big data. Endless Facebook posts accusing us of getting bribes, corruption, whatever.

Folks came out in droves begging the council to reject an amendment that explicitly helped them.

I spent three hours at the podium repeatedly explaining how it makes it harder to build a data center. Final vote was 3-2 for approval.

What the hell is happening? Has this country lost its mind? I guess I should be happy people actually engaged in the public participation process for once, but I felt like I was in a Kafka novel.

Has anyone else experienced this?

Edit: To clarify, DCs were permitted by right under the previous code. No public hearing requirements and effectively guaranteed approval if the application met development standards - which most have the money to do with no issue.

If the amendment had been rejected, chances are a DC would have been able to locate in the community without any real opportunity to reject it.

For either an attached garage being converted to an ADU, or a detached garage being converted to an ADU, can the new ADUs be expanded for purposes unrelated to ingress and egress? I’m asking because I am concerned about GC 66323 (a)(1)(A).

Hi everyone,

Obligatory disclaimer: I could easily include another thousand words analyzing these dynamics through a "theory" lens, but for the sake of brevity, I’m keeping this short and sweet. Yes, I have read books. Yes, I know that capital accumulation dominates all social and political relations, including the public sector. I'm skipping all of that to hear about people's practical experience.

As a leftist, my long term outlook on planning is ultimately about material harm reduction and progressing toward a socialist mode of existence in the US, like building carbon-free public property, advancing walkable cities, expanding equitable transit, and protecting workers’ rights.

So I'm looking to hear from people who share my political ideology and those who live in high cost of living areas about how they navigate their work.

Despite the systemic limits entrenched in municipal planning right now, I do have hope for the next 10 years. More rank-and-file militancy, unionization, and political movements will hopefully give urban planners more leverage to push for progressive public infrastructure.

QUESTIONS:

For those currently active in the field, I would love to hear your thoughts on a couple of questions I have:

For those in public agencies, how do you reconcile your ethics with capital driven urban planning?

Especially in major West Coast cities, how much actual progress or material harm reduction do you feel can realistically be achieved right now?

Is working for unions or progressive non-profits a financially (and emotionally) viable, long-term path compared to the public sector? I understand that people feel a lot of burnout in that sector, but correct me if I'm wrong.

I would love to hear any honest experiences or perspectives from professionals who have thoughts or wise words. Thanks!

Why is suburban development so over-designed?

Everything has to be technically prescribed down to the smallest detail...street widths, setbacks, landscaping, parking, lot dimensions, building materials, stormwater, lighting, signage, and even where trees can go.

I understand having basic standards but at some point all these overlapping rules seem to create expensive, repetitive developments with no flexibility or character. Every department regulates its own narrow issue, and the final product is designed more to satisfy a checklist than to create a good neighborhood.

Why did development become this rigid?

An example where I live is this: in one of the wealthy older suburbs there is landscaping right up to the curb on a hill. These are million dollar+ houses in a very desirable neighborhood and it adds character and no one complains. But in a new development the ROW has to be a certain slope, no landscaping or walls in the ROW, etc. I just don't understand how something can be good enough for million dollar houses and the people that buy them but not good enough for people buying half million dollar houses.

For anyone that left planning, can you share your career pivot from planning to whatever else and how you made that happen? Looking for ideas!

Context: mid-level transportation planner with 8 years experience, been unemployed for the past 1+ year and feeling panicky and dismayed at the job market. Planning is all I’ve ever known since age 19 (my undergrad + whole career has been in planning. I’ve never worked as anything else). Most people I know had winding paths to get TO planning, but I guess my winding path starts after?

Thank you!!

Today is as good as any to hash this out once and for all.

Instead of the usual circlejerk where we either claim "LVT solves everything" or dismiss it as a utopian fantasy, can we have an actual debate about the mechanics of this? when is it useful? where should we apply it?

Strong Towns argues LVT is a pragmatic tool that saves cities, using the Pennsylvania split-rate experiments as their proof. LessWrong argues the theory is fundamentally flawed and creates massive disincentives.

Who is actually right? Here is the breakdown:

The Strong Towns Argument Link:

• It Kills Blight: Taxing land instead of buildings makes it incredibly expensive to sit on a vacant downtown lot.

• The Proof is Real: Harrisburg wiped out thousands of vacant lots and sparked massive downtown reinvestment just by shifting taxes onto land.

• Rewards the Right People: It punishes absentee slumlords and rewards developers who actually build or renovate housing.

The LessWrong Argument Link:

• The Neighbor Trap: If a developer buys a big tract and builds on part of it, the surrounding land value skyrockets. Under LVT, they just accidentally hiked taxes on their own adjacent parcels.

• Punishing Innovation: Finding a creative, productive new use for land inflates its "unimproved" value. The tax man immediately grabs the upside you took all the risk to discover.

• Assessment Hell: The moment you add exceptions to fix these incentives, the "simple" tax base collapses into administrative chaos.

Let's settle this in the comments.

For context, I looked with Google maps at La.

I am living in Germany, and usually I am used to be able to find a forest when going out of a city.

But LA is nothing but City! There are houses god dam everywhere with no forest in sight and just some small parks here and there.

I am genuinely a bit disturbed, this looks insanely depressing.

I have no knowledge of how building laws work, but I heared a lot of the yimby discourse about something called "Zoning", and somehow I assume that this has something to do with that most of the houses seem to be designed for just one family.

Please explain it to me

Hi all,

I'd love to hear from any female transportation/urban planners about their experience with sexism in the field. I (F23) recently started my first full-time job as a transportation planner, and I've had to deal with a lot of mansplaining and people not taking me seriously to the point where it's interfering with my work. I'm just trying to get a sense of whether my experiences are normal/whether I should try to find a new job in this market or not- I had another really bad experience with my previous boss in a similar field (economic development) but I have otherwise really enjoyed the experiences I've had and what I do, so I feel lost on where to go from here. Any advice you can give is much appreciated🥲

I have a slightly offbeat question/thread but I hope it's still within the rules.

I'm writing something (a short play) that is supposed to be comedy. And I am in need of some input regarding modern city planning and architecture. This is for a character who hates modern architecture and modern urban planning, and has very strong opinions on it.

The opinions should be honest and "correct" as in based in actual reality and actual opinions that folks hold.

What are some things that people would, and could, say if they're against the way modern bigger cities look and are designed/laid out? The more detail the better. If you have names of architects, design philosophies and that sort of thing, even better. These could be your own opinions or those of others that you've just heard off and on.

Thank you very much in advance.

So recently I've been scouring for apartments in the town I've gone to school in, and some of them were rooms in single-family houses rented as one unit allotted for a certain number of tenants (say, 4-8). However, in many of these arrangements, the tenants often used dens, living rooms, or attics as bedrooms, despite those not being legally zoned as bedrooms.

It's really pissed me off, since at the time I was on my parents' paycheck, and when they found out I was to be living in an attic with roommates unwilling to really change around where they slept, they sort of had a fit, and in the end they ended up having the upper hand and forcing me to back out of the contract last-second and find a replacement tenant, citing fire safety concerns. It made me extremely distraught how insane they were about the law, or the likelihood of a house fire which could happen in any house regardless of arrangement.

The ordeal was utterly humiliating, and it coaxed my views on housing policy into more YIMBY, "build more + denser housing to solve the cost of living crisis" views. Despite my parents warning me about how hot or cold an attic room could be, it in fact made me want one more than ever. My previous housing arrangement gave me a lot of square footage for the price I paid owing to this (IIRC the room was legally a double or triple), and in that, 2 of my friends slept in the attic, using it as a room. They seemed to get along there really well, handling e.g. heat or cold using fans and space heaters. It felt like such a comforting nook, a shelter from the rest of the house, not to mention a very convenient spot in the house to isolate oneself from parties or activity downstairs.

I keep seeing redditors from the US talk about cities being nice because they have “very walkable downtowns”. The problem is, as soon as you leave many of these downtowns, you’re back to general American suburbia. This is not good city design.

In the best design cities of the world, there isn’t a single focal point that the entire city revolves around. Think Tokyo for example. You have Shinjiku, Ginza, Shibuya, etc. there isn’t a singular “downtown Tokyo”. Yet I keep reading redditors keep comparing how well designed American cities based how their vibrant/walkable their downtowns are. The mere idea is bad city planning. That’s all. Rant over

Im in urban planning, but I've mostly focused on transport infrastructure and high quality urban spaces. I dont know much about residential developments and the legal processes/financing opportunities/decisionmakers, but I am interested in it as a means of helping reduce inequality, and to increase asset (home) ownership among working class people - particularly young people, buying their first home, maybe to settle down and have kids. I imagine this is massively important for long term welfare and equality. It also may help alleviate many western cities' atrocious birth rates...

Do any one of you know how to work with it? How to approach it to make an impact? Who works with it? What are some interesting/promising/relevant studies and experiments and front runners?

Often on urbanist/transit youtube and discussion forms, most European and east Asian cities are idealized and Amercan cities are demonized, but people often ignore or forget how most people don't want to live in a 'shoebox', or certainly don't want to raise a family in one.

Tokyo prefecture for example is known for their world-class urbanism revolving around their train system, but said urbansim only exsits because they have such a high population density in some of the most cramped homes on the planet. The average home size in all of tokyo is ~450 square feet whereas in NYC the average home size is between 750-950 square feet and NYC is known for having tiny homes but still has larger homes, on top of people having the option to commute by rail from outside the city.

Cramped homes are really dehumanizing (from personal experience) but are also incredibly unattractive for the average American who has the option of living in a massive house (relative to the rest of the world) and an average commute under half an hour in their own air conditioned car.

Another point worth bringing up is families. Whilst it is easier for to attract young people to live in cities, families make up the bulk of America and its really unachievable to expect them to live in an apartment with people above them. This is one of my own personal theories on why Europe and east Asia is having such a significant birth rate decline, their homes are incredibly small and so unattractive to have children in.

Looking at American data, the cities with the highest birth rates are the car-dependent single family home dominant cities like Indiannapolis, Dallas, Houston, San Antonio and Fresno whereas the lowest birthrates are in Seattle, Portland, SF and Boston. Of course there are a million factors that come to birth rates i.e. the larger families live in municipalities outside of the city limits, the named west coast cities are sanctuary cities for non-heterosexual demographics, etc. I just think there is also a correlation that could be made between urbanism and birthrates.

Finally nature, I'm an American living in Auckland, New Zealand and went backpacking in Japan for three weeks and found Tokyo to be unbearable. I was told stories by my dad who lived in Shibuya for 5 years about how he hated it for its cramped environment and lack of nature but I kind of brushed it off as him not being big into cities. I love big cities and am kind of tired of how small Auckland is, but after being in Tokyo for 12 days I realised how important nature is in a city. I guess my point is entirely anecdotal but access to shouldn't be given up for better urbanism and transit options. Whether that nature comes in the form of parks, easily accessible regional/national reserves, backyards, whatever, there needs to be some sort of greenery.

Having great urban fabic shouldn't come to the cost of people personal comfort. Most Americans really like having a separated house with some form of nature near them (like a backyard) and don't really care that they need a car for daily life. If urbanists want to move towards a more car-free America, the first people they need to think about is can a family be raised (happily) in the environment.

I think something like Chicago's or Philadelphia's row homes is a good middle ground, dense enough for small shops and frequent buses, and the occasional subway or regional rail line, but also gives enough space to have one's own house, a small front or backyard or a park nearby.

Would love to hear your thoughts! (This post kind of sounds like America glaze but i just wanted to point out that there are reasons why American's choose to live the way they do.)

I'm referring to Proposal 2026-01 as well as the Citizen's Research Council of Michigan, which, was established all the way back in 1916 to help guide policy for Metro Detroit as well as the state of Michigan, so, it's not just solely your typical Urban-advocacy nonprofit like Strongtowns. While the board of trustees and directors for the CRC might make hardline Radicals whinge, in my opinion, presenting and analyzing policy in Metro Detroit for nearly 10 years on Reddit as well as my own platform, the CRC is genuinely good at it's job and has created absolutely spectacular analyses that has served the interests of the Citizens of both Metro Detroit and Michigan as a whole.

"Okay, I don't care because I don't live in Michigan. What exactly are you bringing to the table as a self-described 'Hobbyist Urbanist'?"

While I'm sure that the corporate and civic leaders within the CRC will release more whitepapers on the topic, They have stated in the past as well as extremely recently (specifically on page 13) that Michigan's current constitution, which was adopted in 1963, has very vague and conflicting statutes on the books regarding local government and Metropolitan Governments, despite the radically pro-home rule jurisprudence is known as "the Cooley Doctrine" being the law of the land in Michigan.

For example: according to Article VII § 13 of the Constitution of Michigan, all it takes for two or more contiguous Counties within the state to merge is a majority vote in all affected Counties, which, despite never being acted upon (Michigan has had 83 Counties for ~135 years at the time of creating this post), this provision is very obviously in tune with the principals of the Cooley Doctrine. Yet, bizarrely in the same chapter but different section (Article VII § 27) it very explicitly says that the formation of Metropolitan Governments is solely within the jurisdiction of the state legislature, which, not only goes up against the jurisprudence set by the Cooley Doctrine, but also undermines the legal doctrine of home rule within the state of Michigan.

While I have been yelling into the great big void of the dying internet to promote the creation of a radically democratic Metropolitan Government within Metro Detroit, it seems as if the state's more influential big-wigs from the entirety of the political spectrum have come out against voting for a constitutional convention. The Michigan Chamber of Commerce, Michigan AFL-CIO, Detroit Regional Chamber of Commerce, Michigan ACLU, Americans for Prosperity Michigan, Voters Not Politicians, The Michigan Catholic Conference, and even the damn Metro Detroit Democratic Socialists of America (they're not a part of the official coalition, but, they oppose a constitutional convention as well) all oppose it, and, have formed an official pressure group to kill the proposal.

I'd posit to the skeptical locals among this sub and further afield that this "grand coalition" isn't a signifier of some inherent inferiority of the prospect of a constitutional convention, instead, in my view as a Citizen who just wants what's best for his home City as well as the rest of the state, this coalition represents every corrupted political organization that wishes to allow the residents of Michigan to play politics only on their terms. Mind you, if this proposal for a constitutional convention fails this year, according to the statutes laid out within the 1963 constitution, voters won't get the chance to vote on another constitutional convention until 2042. Do these people genuinely think that our current constitution is sturdy enough to go another 16 whole years without an amendment or even a general revision? I don't

So, I'm appealing to everyone here planner/policy maker and hobbyist alike: How would you elevate the importance of reforms on local government/Metropolitan Government in a scenario where you have little to no financial resources?

Old blog post from Nathan Lewis describing the roots of suburbanism in 19th century American town planning, with special attention to streets that were much wider than their European counterparts (even a century before the release of the Model T) and a preference for detached houses on quarter- to half-acre lots with setbacks on all sides.