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Daniel Herriges
@DanielStrTowns
Senior Editor at . Tweets are my own. He/him. Follow/RT/like ≠ endorsement.
Sarasota, FLstrongtowns.orgJoined November 2018

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Fun thread of skinny house designs created with Midjourney that would be right at home in Austin. (Or at least an Austin without minimum lot sizes or parking mandates.) I love the way these AI tools help imagine familiar places transformed.
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It's 2028 in Austin, TX. Four years have passed since the city was liberated from its onerous land-use and zoning restrictions. Which row house are you living in? 👇
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(6/6) Urbanists shouldn't be afraid to press their case for urbanism being good in itself. Walkable neighborhoods are popular! It's a winning case! We don't have to lean on affordability as the *only* reason to want to break the stranglehold of single-family zoning.
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(5/6) Thing is, even if upzoning didn't lower average rents the slightest bit, it'd still be a net plus to legalize walkable urban neighborhoods in more places. Apartments, plexes, mixed use should be allowed because they're good and lots of people want to live that way!
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(4/6) I'm wary of the way that zoning reform has become almost completely tethered to the cause of housing affordability (in the media and the rhetoric of advocates + electeds), because it's setting us up for backlash when it doesn't magically make rents lower in the near term.
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(2/6) US cities used to have lots of small-scale developers building abundant infill housing—until the combo of downzoning and suburban flight in the late 20th century all but obliterated them. We need to rebuild that economic ecosystem.
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(1/6) The litmus test for zoning reform shouldn't be, "Does it bring about lower rents right away?" Or even in a few years. That's a test cities aren't likely to pass: upzoning isn't magic. But it's an important prerequisite for a sane housing market.
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I saw someone else say this recently so it's hardly an original thought, but one really does get the sense that many Americans implicitly think of the domain of "housing policy" as merely fighting over the scraps of residential land NOT reserved for SFH.
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What a ridiculous framing. No city is "filling up" with luxury apartments. There is an enormous amount of undeveloped or redevelopable land in American cities. And single-family homes occupy far more land than any kind of apartments.
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Good thread:
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“We need housing for FAMILIES, not more studios and 1-bedrooms for tech workers/yuppies/your local bogeyman” is a common complaint about new housing; but it ignores the changing demographics of America’s households. A Thread on demographic mismatch.
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This discussion started with a genuine issue of protecting a public good. You do that by setting aside public land, not by enforcing auto-oriented suburbanism: private property for the enjoyment of a few, flanking nominally public sand that's hard for the many to access + enjoy.
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"They'll overdevelop everything if we let them" is almost always an argument that is both a) innumerate, and b) oblivious to the material constraints on construction itself. (To be fair, many optimistic YIMBY projections of housing growth after upzoning also fall into trap (b).)
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Reminds me of opponents of missing-middle zoning who shout, "Developers are going to bulldoze our neighborhoods! There won't be single-family homes left as an option!" And it's like, so the population of your major US city is going to double or triple in a decade? No it's not.
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If more Florida beach towns were built at the density of many Italian or Spanish beaches (deliberately ignoring any aesthetic argument), there would be far more undeveloped coastline left over in the state. Demand is not infinite. There aren't *that* many people.
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There are some beach towns in Florida that have a charming, "out of time" feel that would be lost if unfettered development occurred. But the main culprit that has overrun these places over time isn't towers, it's endless miles of McMansions dictated by McMansion zoning.
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The sand is public, but a very common pattern in FL beach towns is that the handful of required public accesses to said sand are hidden on obscure side streets, with almost no parking. In places with no transit. The actual beachfront property is mostly private and residential.
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Many Florida beaches are traffic-clogged in high season, to the point where locals who don't live right there just avoid them from December-March. Might be picturesque but this is not remotely a success story for the ideal of the masses getting to enjoy a less-developed beach.
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I've spent a lot of time on Siesta Key. It's basically suburban with a small "village" center. The resident population is very affluent (of course, because housing is so limited). Winter traffic is notably horrendous, can back up 30-60 mins at the two bridges to the island.
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You can poke around Google Street View and get a feel for this easily, because there's imagery of almost the state's entire coastline, actually shot from the beach by someone walking. (Check it out, it's awesome.)
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Most Florida beach towns are basically run-of-the-mill suburbs next to an ocean, in terms of built form. Outside of metro Miami, there aren't a lot of high-rise stretches. It's in fact easy to find a beach where you don't have to look at towers, because that's like 80% of them.
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Virtually the entire Atlantic coast of the state (400 miles) is built-up (all but Cape Canaveral), as is the Gulf Coast from north of Clearwater to Naples / Marco Island (200 miles). This is *because* of almost universally suburban-style, low-rise development enforced by zoning.
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Lots to unpack in this discussion that I don't care to, but as a FL resident for over 10 years, the idea that low-rise zoning is protective of the tranquility of Florida's beaches is bizarre and backwards. It's quite the opposite.
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Replying to @EmuInAmerica and @upzone_CA
Assuming it's developable. Absolutely. They have literally filled in swamps to build housing in Florida. California is different as the topo is a challenge often. But Florida? Virtually every mile of coast would be consumed without question.
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Benefit of being an urban parent: We have 2 playgrounds within a 5 min walk and they're always full of kids. Kids and parents get the opportunity to socialize. You start to see the same families that live within blocks of you every day, and that's how community forms.
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That last point gets frustratingly buried in the YIMBY/NIMBY wars. A lot of people have talked themselves into affirmatively defending suburban-style zoning, just because nobody can prove that upending it would solve the housing crisis overnight. It's a weird status quo bias.
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3) Most importantly, the best reason to broadly upzone cities applies even if it doesn't, in itself, do a thing for housing affordability. It's that walkable urbanism should be legal! Auto-oriented, use-segregated development patterns are bad!
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2) Yet the research *doesn't* refute the idea that a revolutionary change in the prevailing zoning regime could make housing much more abundant and affordable. It can't answer that, bc almost all existing examples of upzoning are incremental tweaks at the margins of the system.
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1) The question of whether upzoning will meaningfully promote affordability is, indeed, uncertain and probably so context-dependent that there isn't a meaningful general answer. Anyone who claims the answer is clear-cut is either an ideologue, disingenuous, or just ill-informed.
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Three not-at-all comprehensive or conclusive thoughts on the question of how upzoning affects housing production and affordability (brief thread):
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In a new article in @JPL_SAGE, I document everything current research tells us about the impacts of upzonings & downzonings on housing production, housing prices, and demographics. I review dozens of scholarly articles & offer a broad view on research ⤵️ journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/08
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"Complete Streets" is a well-intended idea that can nonetheless be actively harmful in the hands of engineers who are still operating with auto-centric design priorities and a rote, checklist mentality. Unfortunately, that may be most engineers.
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This street won multiple Complete Streets awards. It's a horrible & deadly stroad that separates a residential neighborhood from a DC Metro transit stop. Check out these before and after photos (I double checked -- we don't have this backward).
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🧵All right, y'all. I don't do this for all my pods, but my latest one is a) a little technical, but b) super, super important, so I want to unpack it with a thread, if only to persuade you to listen. Geek out with me!
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Good thread on how immediate postwar (50s / 60s) suburbia has more in common with traditional urbanism than with later incarnations of suburbia. The basic template for walkability, mixed uses, and adaptability over time is generally present in these places.
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There's a false timeline in a lot of urbanist discussions — where a lot of people seem to think the 50s and 60s was peak era of suburbia. But (despite rapid growth of tract housing) the suburbia of the 1950s looks a lot more like its prewar urbanism than modern suburbia. 🧵
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BREAKING: Arlington County, Va., will allow multi-unit residential buildings with up to 4 -- and in some cases 6 -- units across the county, effectively ending single-family-only zoning at the doorstep to the nation's capital.
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