City Life

Fewer cars. Faster travel. Less honking. And some questions we still can’t answer.

Good news for rail fans: Recently, Illinois legislators discussed a groundbreaking bill to launch statewide train service.

Senate Bill 1901 and House Bill 3285 and would beef up the Illinois Department of Transportation’s Bureau of Railroads, giving it the clout to plan, engineer, and coordinate elements of a statewide rail program. The Senate Appropriations-Public Safety and Infrastructure Committee mulled over the proposed law on April 23. The analogous House committee considered the bill on April 30.

The aim of this initiative is coordinate train and bus service all across the Prairie State. The backbone of the system would be high-speed rail between Chicago and St. Louis, and service would be aligned with local public transportation.

In addition to supersizing IDOT's railroad bureau, the legislation would help bankroll the maintenance and construction of existing and new track and bridges. It would also help pay for electrifying track, purchasing new trainsets, and supporting ongoing operations.

Representatives of the High Speed Rail Alliance advocacy group headed to Springfield, presumably by rail, on the 30th to lobby electeds and attend the meeting.

State-level rail programs like this could be essential for growing passenger rail ridership across the country. So if Illinois has success with this effort, it could encourage other states, especially our Midwestern peers, to follow suit.

California has a major slate of housing law that’ll significantly push housing production this session and dramatically transform the state. There are three major proposed bills that have caught my eye. The first is Senate Bill 79, authored by state senator Scott Wiener (D - San Francisco), which is his fourth attempt at a transit-upzoning bill. SB 79 would re-zone areas around “high quality” transit stops, primarily rail stations, to allow for 6 - 7 story apartments within a quarter-mile of a major transit stations and 4 - 6 stories within a half-mile. The bill also removes a legal constraint on public transit agencies by allowing them to develop high-density housing and commercial properties on their public property with few restrictions. This is how East Asian countries approach mass transportation and it would provide alternative revenue for public transit by not leaving them dependent on fares and taxes for operations exclusively.

The other notable bill is Senate Bill 607, also authored by Wiener, which functionally exempts nearly all infill sites (meaning areas already developed) from CEQA lawsuits where the proposed project is housing, public transit and green energy related. By default, it declares these things in infill locations as inherently a climate and environmental good. Usage of CEQA to delay housing, green energy and transportation projects by NIMBYs in California was repeatedly cited in Derek Thompson and Ezra Klein’s “Abundance” book. CEQA is also used by the Building Trades to negotiate with non-profit and for-profit developers to use their labor or risk litigation. The last bill is Assembly Bill 647, authored by Assemblymembers Buffy Wicks (D - Oakland) and Mark González ( D - Los Angeles), which would legalize 2-8 unit homes on every owner-occupied parcel in California with 1 low income unit required. This bill will not be at the Senate Housing committee hearing on Tuesday since it’s an Assembly bill, but its significance is worth putting on your radar.

The situation in Sacramento today is much different than in 2019. The state has begun passing streamlining laws and zoning reforms with no political blowback as was once feared. After Trump’s 2024 victory, Democrats both at the state and federal level are looking at the grim projections of California’s housing shortage ceding more population to red states, who are rapidly out-building California in homes, which will cause the Democrats to be locked out of the presidency after 2030. This and the devastating fires in Los Angeles explains why so many major housing bills have been introduced this session, and why the stakes are high in the Housing Committee hearing on Tuesday.

With national pressure on California, state legislators are beginning to take this situation seriously and that’s reflected by AB 647, the 8-unit statewide law. What’s unique about this law is that co-authoring it with zoning trailblazer Buffy Wicks (D - Oakland) is Assemblymember Mark Gonzalez (D - Los Angeles), who is the former chair of the Los Angeles County Democratic Party and a former presidential elector of the Electoral College. His co-authoring is a major deal since historically Los Angeles legislators are the most antagonistic to state housing laws due L.A.’s cultural disposition for single-family suburbanism. Gonzalez’s authoring of such a major law means L.A. legislators are probably thawing in favor of more home construction after years of fighting against the more pro-growth Bay Area represenatives.

Modeled on towns in Italy and Greece built long before the advent of cars, Culdesac Tempe is what its developers call the country’s first neighborhood purposely built to be car free.

Ryan Johnson, the Culdesac chief executive, said he wanted to offer a blueprint for living in a walkable place, even in a state that’s car-centric and often broiling.

“It’s one of the best things we can do for climate, health, happiness, low cost of living, even low cost of government,” said Mr. Johnson, who lives at Culdesac, too. “It’s also a better lifestyle. We all become the worst versions of ourselves behind the wheel.”

While there’s a short-term parking lot for deliveries, retailers and guests, Culdesac residents are expected to get around by the nearby light rail system, as well as on buses, scooters, electric bikes and by using ride shares. There are 22 retail shops, several of them live-work spaces, and a small Korean market. So far, 288 apartment units have been built on eight of the site’s 17 acres with another 450 units planned.

Every spring, Harvard’s freshmen are sorted across 12 residential houses. But the children of the 0.1 percent have a 13th option: 1075 Massachusetts Avenue. With a tenant directory resembling the Forbes Four Hundred, the 20-unit building is the go-to off-campus option for nepo babies at the Ivy League college.

“It has been extremely popular, and the clientele we have is obviously a very upper-end clientele,” says developer Raj Dhanda, who bought the Harvard Square property in 2009.

For real-estate investors, luxe housing on elite college campuses is increasingly attractive. These buildings’ owners point to benefits such as the constant churn of well-to-do students (who recommend the housing to incoming ones) and complicated zoning laws that scare away rival developers. “Student housing has been the darling of the real-estate-investment community for several years now,” says Daniel Bernstein, the president and chief investment officer of the Philadelphia-based, multi-billion-dollar real-estate firm Campus Apartments.

A big problem with homeownership is that we ask it to do the impossible: We want it to remain affordable to young families while at the same time serving as a magical tool for accumulating personal wealth. But a house can’t build wealth while remaining affordable. The math is the math. The less affordable my house becomes, the more housing wealth I build. In fact, purchasing a home is never really a great investment unless your home grows less affordable in relative terms.

The truth is, homebuying is often more expensive than renting, and for most homeowners in most places over most periods of time, it’s not even that great an investment. The media tend to obsess on “hot” real-estate markets, but in vast swathes of the country, home prices are close to flat. Rather, it is housing stability, not affordability or wealth-building, that has been homeownership’s most valuable and reliable benefit.

The primary goal of the public option is to deliver stable housing to renters, too.

It is stable housing that enables us to lay down roots in the community and to build the relationships with our neighbors that we all rely on to get through even the most routine of times. It is stable housing that empowers our children to fully participate in their schools without living in constant fear of being uprooted from their friends, teachers, and classrooms. It is stable housing that is a prerequisite for the “continuity of community both for old residents and for newcomers” that the pioneering urbanist Jane Jacobs explained is so crucial to maintaining the vitality and diversity of neighborhoods. It is stable housing that provides the peace of mind necessary to go back to school or to start a business or to embark on the 22-year adventure into policy wonkery that led to the writing of this sentence.

Without housing stability, a house can never truly be a home. And for most homebuyers, this stability is provided not through homeownership itself, but through a 30-year fixed-rate mortgage. How can we possibly provide comparable stability to renters? Well, if you think about it, a fixed-rate mortgage is really just a form of rent control.

Because housing is expensive, it is rarely purchased or built without financing; and because interest is a form of rent, that makes us all renters. Whether we are paying a mortgage or paying a lease, we are all essentially renting money—either directly from a bank in the case of mortgage borrowers, or indirectly through a landlord in the case of renters. But an important difference between renting and owning is that few residential rental leases guarantee a stable rent for more than a year, whereas a 30-year fixed-rate mortgage locks in your “rent” month after month for three decades. It was in fact the rent control inherent in my 30-year fixed-rate mortgage that ultimately kept my daughter and me in our house.

The public option would function as a form of rent control too, but unlike that imposed by some cities on the private market, it would both stabilize rent and massively add to supply. It would achieve this by tapping into a vast and underutilized store of capital: the voluminous borrowing capacity that many municipalities enjoy. By collateralizing interest-only bonds against future rents, the public option serves as a conduit for renters to collectively borrow cheap money at fixed rates for long terms with no taxpayer subsidy.

In the first month of congestion pricing, the MTA reported over 1 million fewer vehicle entries into the toll zone than would be expected without the program​, driving the significant traffic reduction seen above. It’s also worth noting that the above chart shows reduction in travel times rather than congestion—in many cases, congestion has completely disappeared, and the new travel times represent a congestion-free trip. This reduction reverses a years-long trend of rising traffic into Manhattan​ - congestion pricing took a worsening gridlock problem and solved a significant portion of it overnight. Additionally, while there were fears that congestion pricing would just re-route traffic to other boroughs, the data from the first months of congestion pricing suggests that traffic has not increased elsewhere in the city.

Transit ridership has seen a notable spike since the implementation of congestion pricing as travelers into Manhattan are switching from driving to transit.

The MTA as a whole is averaging 448K more public transit riders per day this year. To put this into perspective, the second-highest ridership subway in the US is the DC Metro, which averaged 304K riders per day in January this year. The MTA ridership growth since congestion pricing went into effect is almost 50% larger than the total ridership of America’s next-largest subway system.

Unsurprisingly, bus ridership has seen the greatest relative growth, likely due to the fact that it most immediately benefits from congestion pricing thanks to faster travel times.

An hour and a half: That’s how long it used to take Juan Carlos Plata to travel to and from work along the winding, car-choked streets of La Paz, Bolivia.

Now, it takes only 11 minutes.

“It’s been really good for us. It’s incredible,” Plata said. “It’s calm. No one bothers you. You couldn’t expect anything like this before.”

The cable car, or teleferico, was a pipe dream for years. But then, with the financial boom of the late 2000s and early 2010s, then-President Evo Morales made it a priority. It was inaugurated in 2014. And now, 200,000 people use it each day.

A center-left think tank went viral for concluding in the aftermath of the 2024 election that Democrats “need to own the failures of Democratic governance in large cities”. Although the think tank doesn’t specify these governance issues, this is part of a larger and now very strong narrative that refers to homelessness and the impacts of encampments on local communities in Democratic areas. This has been a common post-2024 election autopsy from pundits mostly based out of the coasts: that Democratic-run cities with high homelessness and encampments are radicalizing housed citizens into voting against Democrats.

The empirical evidence is weak. There’s sufficient evidence that progressive, left-wing candidates performed worse than moderate, liberal candidates in federal elections. But Trump won mostly from less educated voters whose news sources are heavily social media based. The Trump vote didn’t dominate as severely in the places where issues like unsheltered homelessness are most acute.

In the Oakland Metropolitan area where I reside, Trump’s vote share had weak-to-very moderate correlation with our most prolific encampments. It may explain some small urban variance among non-white, non-degree holding areas of Oakland (note the relatively high 25% Trump support around the very Latino and Asian Fruitvale-San Antonio area; area contains a massive encampment) but these were still strongly blue areas in the 2024 election. It could be a correlation problem as areas with heavy encampments also tend to be more crime-heavy areas which may be the primary factor.

Something I’m imploring liberal writers to be conscious about is not falling for Republican framing on important issues. Liberals tend to be introspective to a self-defeating extent. The issues of San Francisco, Los Angeles, D.C., Seattle, and New York City are coastal city problems, not “Democratic problems.” Nearly all American major or notable cities are Democratic. I’m not sure why we’re glamorizing Republican-run areas implicitly either: red America is de-populating en-masse and most of the population growth Texas steals from California is to Democratic cities or purple suburbs. For some weird reason it's considered punching down for Democrats to ever shine spotlights on the low human developmental indices of Republican areas and states.

The problem with Democratic, coastal cities is that they’re usually popular and rich with jobs, and the local governments are bad if not antagonistic at accommodating the millions of people who want to move there.

It’s incontrovertible that blue states on the coasts have more homeless residents than red states and blue states inland. Most homeless people were formerly housed within the region they lost their housing in, which affirms that Democratic housing markets are at fault. However, there are clear exceptions: Virginia, Minnesota, and Illinois are blue states (yes, V.A. has a Republican governor, but so did California in the 2000s). New Mexico is on the lower end of homelessness. Is this about Democrats or is this about being close to the coast?

The large labor markets of big cities offer greater possibilities for workers to gain skills and experience through successively better employment opportunities. This “experience effect” contributes to the higher average wages that are found in big cities compared to the economy as a whole. Racial wage inequality is also higher in bigger cities than in the economy on average. We offer an explanation for this pattern, demonstrating that there is substantial racial inequality in the economic returns to work experience acquired in big cities. Using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, 1979 we find that each year of work experience in a big city increases Black and Latinx workers’ wages by about one quarter to half as much as White workers’ wages. A substantial amount of this inequality can be explained by further racial disparities in the benefits of high-skill work experience. This research identifies a heretofore unknown source of inequality that is distinctly urban in nature, and expands our knowledge of the challenges to reaching interracial wage equality.

In nearly every American city, state and local ordinances dictate the minimum number of parking spaces required for everything from homes and restaurants to retail. Many of these regulations have remained unchanged since the 1960s, forcing today’s businesses, residents and cities to conform to the outdated priorities of planners from generations ago.

In Dallas, for example, regulations dating back to 1965 thwarted German Sierra’s plans to open a humble coffee shop and community space in 2022. Despite doing everything the city recommended to be granted a parking exemption, Dallas was unwilling to let Sierra open Graph Coffee unless he provided 18 parking spots, amounting to more square footage than his property possessed.

Sierra’s struggle highlights the uncompromising realities of parking minimums, which put undue strain on small businesses. At the same time, his story also highlights the arbitrary calculus that characterizes these regulations. For example, Dallas has drawn a distinction between a “dry cleaner” and a “laundry service” through its code, mandating that the former must provide 30% more parking than the latter even though critics argue they’re effectively the same use. Earlier this year, the Washington Post reported that San Jose, California, at one point required miniature golf courses to have 1.25 parking spaces per golf tee. In Seattle, bowling alleys needed five spaces per lane.

Ending the mandates and subsidies that require property owners to waste productive land on automobile storage is a priority for Strong Towns. We recognize that empty parking lots are financially unproductive, costly to maintain, and often in conflict with the types of places cities across North America want to be.

Fortunately, a rapidly growing number of cities across North America are beginning to question mandatory minimums, inching toward reforming or even repealing them altogether. Here are some of the communities rethinking their approaches.

Despite a population of 37 million, there’s relatively little congestion and pollution here since the majority of its residents rely on public transit rather than cars. But while Tokyo’s mass transportation system may serve as a global success story, it may not be replicable, because its organic growth over the decades has fostered a unique culture of transit.

Does not fit 100% to technology category, but

Along with the hype, the ambitious experiment—building a "car-free" neighborhood in one of the most auto-dependent population centers on the planet—has aroused skepticism. An article by the nonprofit advocacy organization Strong Towns, for instance, contends that Culdesac is a far cry from "the incremental urbanism and thickening our cities need. A dozen or even a thousand Culdesacs can’t solve that problem," because they would lack long-term growth benefits including "the resilience of a system where many hands have built the neighborhood and have a financial stake in it" and would reflect "a zoning and finance stream that favors industrial over incremental production."

But these critics don’t live there. Those with more proximity see the place as a big plus.

Archived link: https://archive.ph/BdFwc

In an unbelievable hit piece, the Atlantic's deputy executive editor blamed "progressives" for the death of American Dream, blaming Jane Jacob, an advocate for mixed use building in urban environments, for the lack of housing in the US.

Somehow the editor completely failed to account for various obvious reasons that housing became unaffordable, such as NIMBYism, financialization of housing, speculative purchases, loose monetary policies, etc. and put all the blame on "progressives".

Insane paragraph below:

The sclerosis that afflicts the U.S.—more and more each year, each decade—is not the result of technology gone awry or a reactionary movement or any of the other culprits that are often invoked to explain our biggest national problems. The exclusion that has left so many Americans feeling trapped and hopeless traces back, instead, to the self-serving actions of a privileged group who say that inclusion, diversity, and social equality are among their highest values.

Why hasn’t Oakland and the urban East Bay’s public transit system been improved, even as city gets more congested with population growth? Why does Oakland have significantly worse bus service in 2025 than it did in 1990, despite having 40,000 more residents today? Why has San Francisco been building out new subway lines and streetcar routes in areas they’re redeveloping for the last 40 years, while Oakland — whose population increased by 12% in the last decade alone — hasn’t added a single new rapid transit station or line since 1972? Why does Oakland have basically zero plans in the works to expand fast, rapid transit in its city — except for a regional rail plan that mostly is about passing through West Oakland?

San Francisco benefits from having its much superior public transit system organized by one agency (Muni / SFMTA), funded by one powerful organ (the Board of Supervisors) and managed by one person (the Mayor-appointed manager). This is why public transit plays such an influential role in San Francisco politics: the Supervisor and Mayor you elected directly run on issues pertaining to Muni service.

In contrast, East Bay transit is comically disorganized. Most residents have no idea who their AC Transit representative is or if they even have one, so they complain to their local city councilmember. The city council then has to formally communicate to their AC Transit representative requesting service improvements. However, the ACT board director does not run AC Transit but oversees it. Attempts by directors such as director Sarah Syed to communicate to AC’s general manager about improving service (such as not eliminating bus service on Broadway in Downtown Oakland after-hours) has been sanctioned and criticized by other board members. This leads to a political culture of indifference and laziness where there’s no imperative to improve service because AC Transit races are noncompetitive and nobody holds them accountable or even knows they exist.

State transportation officials on Friday narrowed down the designs being considered for the reconstruction of Interstate 94 between Minneapolis and St. Paul, eliminating options with strong community support that would have removed the highway.

The Minnesota Department of Transportation (MnDOT) is recommending that four of 10 designs, which were first introduced in 2023, move forward into an environmental review process. That review will determine the future of the 7.5-mile stretch of I-94 between Hiawatha Avenue in Minneapolis and Marion Street in St. Paul.

Notably absent were designs that considered replacing the highway with an at-grade roadway, an option supported by several environmental activists and the nonprofit, Our Streets. Several elected officials who sit on an advisory committee for the project and who were in attendance at the Friday meeting with MnDOT criticized that absence.

The connection between transportation and health may not be obvious. But how people get around communities is interconnected with physical and mental wellbeing. Easy access to public transit is linked with direct health impacts, like increased levels of physical activity. Transportation also opens doors to other factors that contribute to health — as Sylvaine found with her health care appointments.

“It’s the linkage between you and all of these other things that impact your health,” says Amanda Grimes, an associate professor of health sciences at the University of Missouri–Kansas City. “Access to food itself is a social determinant of health. But how do you get access to food? It usually takes transportation.”

Advocates for zero-fare systems say that the increased mobility they offer supports health, but now, researchers in Kansas City are working to understand just how much. A project led by Grimes and colleagues at the University of Missouri–Kansas City is looking at the immediate and indirect health impacts. (Sylvaine works as an assistant on the research project.)

The researchers are finding a clear health benefit: physical activity.

People who use the bus in Kansas City take more steps per day than the average American, according to Grimes.

A walk to the bus station may not seem like a lot, but Grimes explains that incorporating more movement into daily life is linked to benefits when it comes to health factors like obesity, blood pressure and heart disease. “Every minute we can add really translates into improved health outcomes.”

One of the main selling points of congestion pricing, besides reducing traffic, is improving air quality. Fewer cars on the road means fewer cars emitting exhaust in the nation’s most densely populated city — and less traffic also means that less time spent idling.

An environmental assessment of congestion pricing published in 2023 estimated the impact tolls would have on a number of air pollutants, including carbon monoxide, nitrogen dioxide, particulate matter, and benzene. These chemicals have been linked to health problems including heart disease, respiratory issues, cognitive impairment, and increased risk of cancer. The assessment also looked at the impact tolls would have on greenhouse gases. It analyzed these impacts at a regional level, looking at 12 different counties across New York and New Jersey, and projected how big or small the change in pollutants would be by 2045.

The report found that, with congestion pricing, Manhattan would see a 4.36 percent reduction in daily vehicle-miles traveled by 2045. This would lead to sizable reductions in air pollutants in Manhattan, especially in the central business district (the area drivers must pay a toll to enter). For example, per the environmental assessment’s modeling, the central business district would see a 10.72 percent drop in carbon dioxide equivalents by 2045, as well as a similar drop in fine particular matter, and slightly lower drops in nitrogen oxides and carbon monoxide (5.89 percent and 6.55 percent, respectively).

The first step to meaningful action is recognizing the problem. With mass deportations and political persecution looming, cities that provide protection will experience an influx of new residents, especially migrants and others who are politically oppressed. These newcomers may challenge our infrastructure, housing market, and public services. What can we do to ensure that our future neighbors thrive alongside us?

The response to these challenges must be to provide, not to exclude. To avoid conflicts about whose basic needs get met, we must create abundance: enough homes for everyone, a reliable public transit system, functioning social services, funded schools and libraries, and well-maintained parks. As one of the world’s wealthiest cities, Seattle can make these things happen. By embracing abundance we can overcome our greatest challenges, whether it be skyrocketing housing costs, displacement and homelessness, worsening traffic, or insufficient tax revenue.